by Syd Moore
This wasn’t Seth.
This person was odd – flimsy, amorphous, vague as if waving in a breeze that wasn’t there, for the air was still inside the kitchen. Very still.
Mary was so taken aback that she forgot to be afraid and squinted to determine the outline – tall, thin and diaphanous. With something on her head. A wide-brimmed hat, so curiously anachronistic, was held to the apparition’s hair.
Mary narrowed her eyes again and the figure grew more blurry, less substantial, though she thought saw the bodice flutter, as if there was movement there. The long skirt moved similarly. Gossamer-touched, wispy, the woman looked for all the world like she had walked straight out of the eighteenth century.
‘Oh God,’ Mary muttered. Not again. Not now.
She blinked to get rid of the vision but when her eyes opened she saw there, still, the woman in white, dress shifting …
Though now she spotted something else too – something awful that made her stomach lurch: down by the woman’s sides there was blood, blood all over her hands.
Mary paused, and for one paralysing moment thought the spectre was going to come straight for her. But she didn’t, she straightened her bonnet, set a course for the door, walked over, through it and out.
Oh – my – god.
Mary stood, stuck fast to the spot, her heart battering against her ribcage. Everyone, the whole neighbourhood, must be able to hear it, she thought.
She was going mad. Totally insane. She would have to get an appointment at the doctor’s. She would have to …
A weak rattle echoed up from the cellar.
Her gaze snapped to the stairs.
Christ.
What was going on?
What was real?
What had the ghost done? Was it a ghost or a hallucination?
And why had it got blood on its hands?
A hundred million horrible thoughts churned through Mary’s mind, as she attempted to impose some order – she needed help – maybe her dad or Tom? Or should she phone 999? What to report? A ghost? Don’t be silly. A break-in? Was it? What was happening?
There was another sound, something like a guttural sigh. Something that sounded like surrender and blood.
Someone was still down there.
Oh crap. She’d have to go down. She had to.
Forcing herself to walk across the floor she reached the steep staircase that led down to the basement room. Yep, the light was on but she couldn’t see any further than the bottom of the stairs. Gingerly sliding her back against the wall she took them one trembling step at a time and descended into the bowels of the cellar.
It had never had a particularly pleasant atmosphere.
But now it looked odd. Different.
She couldn’t work it out first of all.
The cellar wasn’t like the cellar. It had been painted a different colour: white. Or was that new carpet on the floor? Why on earth would there be a new carpet in the cellar? And a white one at that. Except right there, in the middle, it wasn’t white at all.
Her eyes travelled up from the thickening stain and took in the sight.
Seth was standing there in some weird ballerina pose – his hands clasped up above his head, fastened to the meat hook, legs bent at the knee – looking like he was about to pirouette off to the left. Why is he doing that? she wondered. If this is a joke … But then she saw something else: something dark was crawling over his chest. Something that was writhing and wriggling down the front of him, puddling, collecting itself on the floor, trying to rise.
‘Seth?’ she cried. ‘Oh god, are you okay?’
It was a stupid question for when she reached the bottom of the stairs the full horror of his state became clear.
It wasn’t a creature that was wriggling down the front. It was Seth’s insides. Someone had sliced his throat and belly and a gallon and a half of blood and gut was dripping out of him.
His eyelids flickered.
Mary screamed, a long sustained howl, then collapsed to the floor with a thump.
CHAPTER ONE
‘No blood.’
‘No blood?’
‘None, thank you.’
‘Is that an order?’
‘Can I give you an order?’
‘I don’t think so. Technically I am the owner of the museum. That’s got to trump curator, I’m afraid.’
‘Has it indeed? Well, still I maintain don’t squirt the blood on. Please.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s tacky. Vulgar.’
‘Yeah, but probably anatomically correct: the noose was likely to have broken the skin when it drew tight around her neck.’
Sam opened his mouth to speak and then shut it again.
‘What?’ I asked and gave him a shrug. ‘People like a bit of sensationalism, don’t they? You told me that. That ye olde granddaddy Septimus thought you had to take that line to get punters into the place. Because that’s what they’re really after, isn’t it? The thrill of the darkness, the nastiness, the safe horror. Don’t you want the museum to flourish?’
‘Did you know, Rosie, they’ve taken the word “lurid” out of the dictionary?’
‘Have they?’ I asked. Seemed a bit odd but whatever rocked your boat.
‘Rosie Strange,’ Sam sighed. ‘If I didn’t know you better I might think that you were winding me up.’ The gold in his eyes glinted.
‘Moi?’ I said. He’d caught me fair and square, I supposed, so I fluttered my new eyelashes at him. They were a recent gift from my auntie Babs who ran a salon not far from here. Then I added, ‘As if.’
Sam stepped away from the exhibit – a replica of a sixteenth-century gibbet with a decomposing waxwork woman encased inside it – and frowned.
‘Actually,’ I said, giving the gibbet a poke, ‘if I’m being honest, I reckon we should get rid of this altogether. There’s something kind of weird about having it here. It’s like violence porn or something. Ursula Cadence went through enough in her lifetime, we should restore some dignity to her.’
Sam raised his eyebrows. ‘Really?’
I did another quick flutter, then said, ‘Let’s just have a simple grave with a cross on it. She hasn’t got one, so we can commemorate her here. That feels better, doesn’t it? Then we can use the end panel to tell the story about what happened to her, you know, after she died and that.’
‘I thought you were going to sell the museum,’ Sam said, a dainty nick of a smile impressing his left cheek.
‘Yeah, well …’ I trailed off and set the bottle of red ink in the open hand of a nearby witchfinder. He was seated stiffly in a high-backed wooden chair that resembled a throne.
‘Don’t put it on Darcy,’ Sam warned and stepped towards his chair. ‘If that stuff spills over him we’ll have to source a new jerkin. There’s no more in the stock room.’
I snorted and cast a glance at the sedentary lord of the manor. ‘Actually, I think we should get rid of him too.’ His chubby grinning face was rouged on the cheeks. A dusty handlebar moustache made him look more twentieth century than seventeenth and definitely a little mental. The red dots I had just added to the eyes now also suggested a hint of unnatural evil. A mere hint mind. ‘He’s the villain of the piece,’ I went on. ‘Well, one of them. Why don’t we recycle him into George Chin?’ I was referring to a not very nice man from the crazy chase we had just been on and who had practically set us up. But really I wanted to see if Sam would bite. He had once liked the Chin guy.
‘Shh,’ Sam hushed and nodded to the mannequin. ‘You’ll hurt his feelings.’
‘Made of wax.’ I flicked the witchfinder’s forehead. The dummy rocked back, upsetting the bottle and spilling its contents all over his lap.
Sam tutted. ‘I could see that coming.’
‘All right, Nostradamus, go and make yourself useful. Fetch me a cloth.’
Another tut then Sam turned on his heel and disappeared out the exit leaving me alone with the waxworks.
It was
quiet in here but for the slight buzz of the electrics. Beyond that you couldn’t hear any traffic or noise. We were very out of the way. It was so different to my flat in Leytonstone, but not uncomfortable. Not really. At least, I thought, now the roof had been repaired we didn’t have to listen to the perpetual drip of water ruining the exhibits.
It dawned on me that I was getting used to this cabinet of curiosities, the Essex Witch Museum. My grandfather Septimus had actually called it the Great Essex Witch Museum, but the ‘Great’ had fallen off a long time ago and I had no intention of rectifying it. The last thing a footloose and fancy-free gal like me needed was a high-maintenance tourist attraction in deepest darkest Essex that sucked up money like a Dyson. I planned to flog it to some real-estate developer soon. Get the big bucks in. Pay off some of my extortionate London mortgage. Maybe put a down payment on a flat somewhere in Spain. I just hadn’t got round to it yet.
To be fair, I’d only inherited the museum a couple of months back and quite a lot had happened in that time to seriously occupy me. Namely the update to the Cadence exhibit, over which the museum’s curator, Sam, and I were currently wrangling. Though the background to this had involved a hell of a lot of a traipsing, albeit in a frantic and rather scary manner, around the country to recover the bones of one Ursula Cadence, a woman executed for witchcraft at the hands of Brian Darcy. But that was a whole other story.
‘Here you go,’ Sam threw a wet J-cloth at me.
I caught it and pretended to give it a sniff, ‘Ah, my favourite – mildew with a hint of disinfectant.’
He rolled up his sleeves and set about sponging up the reddening stain. It was dripping on to the floor. Whoopsie.
‘I’m wondering if you did that on purpose,’ Sam said, and pulled across an abandoned saucepan, once set to catch water from the leaking roof, then dipped his sponge in the gooey liquid it held. I could tell he was trying to sound cross but actually he was grinning.
I liked it when he grinned.
So this was the thing with Sam, right? He really was the most arrogant, irritating and demanding fellow to have about the place, but he knew everything there was to know about Essex witches and had a fairly tight bum to boot. Not literally to boot. Though there were times when I was sorely tempted.
See, I had inherited Sam with the museum. A PhD student-cum-curator/manager/outreach officer, allegedly. Though I still hadn’t worked out the details of what he did in practice. Ran the place, I think. Acted like he owned it. But he didn’t. I did.
‘Why on earth would I wreck my own stock, eh?’ I asked, all innocence, widening my eyes and again batting the lashes.
‘It’s nothing to do with the fact you don’t want the witchfinders in here?’
‘I never said that.’
‘You did. Last night.’
I couldn’t remember doing so but then again, we’d shared a couple of bottles of red and I was a little cloudy on details. Having said that, he was to some extent right. I didn’t like the idea that we had a few nasty witchfinders represented in here. ‘Well, it’s the Essex Witch Museum. There’s a reason Septimus had that emphasis, right? The museum belongs to the witches not the witchfinders. Actually, that’s not true – it belongs to me.’ The ink had soaked through the Darcy dummy’s puffball skirt or shorts or doublet or whatever it was that was covering his privates. It looked like he’d had a nasty accident down there. Sam was still mopping up the drips on the floor.
Cursorily I moved the J-cloth around Darcy’s groin but the damage was clearly done. ‘I say we bin him,’ I said, and gave the old sod a light kick. ‘Or turn him into a witch. There’d be a kind of justice in that. I’ve got a pair of comedy breasts at home that could help the transgendering.’
Sam finished cleaning and knelt back on his haunches. ‘Comedy breasts. Really?’
‘Yeah. From my friend Cerise’s hen night.’
‘I got the impression she was single?’ he said, pushing himself up on to his knees.
‘Yeah.’ I nodded, thinking back to that night. ‘She is.’
‘I see.’ Sam shifted his weight to his calves then caught on to Darcy’s throne and levered himself upright.
I put my hand on my hip and watched him tut at my half-hearted attempt at damage limitation. Then, to my great pleasure, the tut changed into a chuckle and he tossed back his head. His hair was tawny, wavy, thick. It rippled now, like a short mane that needed a trim. I thought it gave him a kind of feline appearance. And this was really the most irritating thing about Sam – he was oddly entrancing. Not my usual type at all. Not that I had a type. I was generally pretty much attracted to people who expressed an interest in me. Which sounds a bit pathetic, I know, but it isn’t because, well, tall, dark and handsome went a long way too. And Sam was. In spades. Dangerously so. And he reminded me of cats. Big ones. Sexy ones. Sometimes, not often, but on a couple of occasions, I’d found a certain kittenish quality lurking beneath the composed exterior. You know, playful. Mostly, however, he prowled around Bagheera-like, watching and thinking, thinking and watching, through dark eyes that switched between umber, coal and amber depending on his mood.
‘Come on then,’ he said, his eyes amber this time. ‘Time to get a move on.’ Then he plucked the J-cloth out of my hands and stalked towards the end of the display to where the switchbox was concealed behind a badly stuffed toad. A second later the exhibition was in darkness, our way out illuminated only be the light coming from an emergency exit sign.
I shivered. It was so damp in this wing I could almost taste it when I breathed in.
‘No time to dither, Rosie, we have to get our socks on.’ Sam was returning to hurry me up. ‘Certainly if we want to meet Ray Boundersby on time.’
Ah yes. Our appointment. It was a bit of a liberty if you asked me. Boundersby had been meant to meet us yesterday but cancelled at the last minute because of ‘work issues’, which I thought highly improbable on a Saturday afternoon when Tottenham was playing Villa. Now, however, he was demanding we went up and meet him at his restaurant. Personally I thought doing business on a Sunday was a massive imposition but this Boundersby bloke was not only a friend of my auntie Babs but also, allegedly, an ex-con to whom you didn’t say no. If you wanted to keep your kneecaps. Plus, he had sounded quite frantic when I listened to his message on the phone. And it helped that he was offering substantial payment. ‘All right,’ I conceded. I would have preferred to go for a Sunday lunch at the Seven Stars down the road. We’d dutifully agreed to give it a rain check.
I could see Sam a few feet in front of me prowling towards the exit. He was wearing a black long-sleeved T-shirt with a helpfully fluorescent pattern that was glowing in the dark. The tee was slightly on the small side, but the tightness on the shoulders highlighted his muscle tone in quite an admirable style. For a second, I wondered if he’d chosen it for that reason. Which meant he might just have selected it for my appreciation. That thought triggered a little flush of chemicals in my stomach, which I tried immediately to counter. Though we’d had a couple of ‘moments’, nothing thus far had developed into fully fledged touching. ‘Boundersby didn’t give you many details, did he?’ he asked over his shoulder.
‘Not really,’ I said, mentally focusing on Ray Boundersby who, I imagined, was far less attractive than my curator. The bloke had only phoned half an hour before he was meant to be here and had rearranged for today. No details, no questions. Apparently it was all ‘need to know’.
Sam pulled back the curtain that partitioned off the Cadence wing from the main body of the Museum. I ducked through and closed it.
‘Well, best not to be tardy, Rosie – that man sounds like someone I should not like to disappoint. Didn’t your aunt say that you let him down on pain of death?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well, come on then.’
The clock on my phone however, suggested it was still early – only half past ten. I figured it would only take about an hour or so to get there from Essex, and
we didn’t have to be in town till one o’clock. Most of the traffic would be coming out of London, not going in.
‘Relax,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’ But he was already round the corner and out of sight.
I sighed and followed him from the Cadence wing and up the corridor to the main reception. Last night Sam had wanted to show me some of the rooms on the floor above this end of the museum. I hadn’t been there yet but he said he’d got some ideas to renovate them. One of them was apparently my dad’s old bedroom. It seemed kind of odd, as I really couldn’t sense much of Ted Strange in the museum at all. He had hotfooted it out of Adder’s Fork, as soon as he came of age and took up a position in a Chelmsford accountancy firm, later moving further south when he met Mum.
Anyway, like I said, I’d brought down a couple of bottles of El Plonko and in the end we hadn’t budged from the living room. Till we went to bed. Separately.
When I visited the museum I slept in my grandfather’s old bedroom. Despite its old-fashioned décor and sparse furnishings, it boasted a luxurious four-poster with a soft mattress and duck-down pillows. Sam used a spare room that came off the living quarters. It was currently stuffed with redundant dummies that doubled as coat stands and toothbrush holders. I couldn’t work out how he could sleep in there – the waxworks gave me the shivers. I’d suggested we moved them all to the storage area on the ground floor. ‘Perhaps next weekend,’ he’d said, then snuck off to bed, leaving his door half ajar.
I was never sure if that was an invitation or not.
In fact, I was in such deep contemplation of this conundrum that I didn’t notice Sam had stopped up ahead and walked right into him, squashing my breasts against his chest completely accidentally. Honest.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and swallowed loudly, backing on to the wall and knocking one of Septimus’s paintings askew. This one looked to be a witches’ sabbath by some woman called Paula according to the label below.
I switched back on to Sam and sent him a brazen smile. ‘Yes?’
He wiped his hair back and apologised again, then said, ‘I suppose we’re, er, taking your car, are we?’