by Amy Cross
Holding the phone up, he showed Joyce the photo he'd shown Emily earlier.
“I told Emily earlier that this was a woman who died on the site of the house. I told her a long story about how poor Mary Meacham disappeared, and I suggested that it might be her spirit that's haunting the house now. Emily immediately recognized this woman and told me that she remembered seeing her in her bedroom.” He paused for a moment, watching for a flicker of emotion in Joyce's eyes. “The only problem is,” he continued, “although the story about Mary is true, the photo was a trick. There's no photo of Mary Meacham. I wanted to test Emily.”
He turned the phone and looked at the image for a moment.
“This is a woman named Loretta Lynn. American country singer. I'm pretty sure Loretta Lynn isn't haunting that house or your family. For one thing, Loretta Lynn is alive and well. And yet...” He paused, staring at the photo. “And yet Emily swore blind this morning that this was the woman who was haunting her twenty-four years ago. I wanted to test her, to see how easily she could be prompted to believe certain things.” Sighing, he slipped the phone away. “It's clear to me now that her version of events can't be trusted. You really damaged her, do you realize that? She can't tell the difference between reality and fiction, between truth and lies.”
He waited for her to reply.
Still, Joyce didn't turn to him.
“That's really all I came to say,” he continued finally, getting to his feet. “I just thought you should know the truth about what a despicable, evil, cruel woman you've been, and about the serious damage you've caused not only to your daughter but also to her daughter. I know this might sound mean, but genuinely, I hope there is a hell, because someone like you deserves to burn there for the rest of eternity.”
Heading to the door, he pulled it open and then glanced back at the old woman.
“I'm going to do what I can to help them,” he added. “A friend of mine is coming tonight and we're going to make Emily face the truth once and for all. It'll be hard for her, but it's the right thing to do. Either that, or we'll prove that ghosts exist and this whole thing has a basis in reality after all, but...” He paused. “Somehow I don't think that's going to happen.”
Joyce Stone didn't react, didn't even flinch, as Robert left the room and pulled the door shut. Still sitting in her wheelchair and staring out at the garden, Joyce watched the calm scene, as a single tear rolled down her cheek.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“It's basically a kind of infra-red scanner,” Douglas explained as he plugged some leads into the box on Emily's kitchen table, “but it alternates its cycle to take into account other possible sources. The theory is that different radiation types might be breaking through from somewhere else. I mean, if any kind of doorway is opening, something must be coming through and if we have the right sensors, we can detect some kind of residue.”
“That's junk science,” Robert said, picking up another part of the device and examining it for a moment, before setting it back down. “You know that, right? It's a bunch of disparate elements held together by faith and hope, two things that are the enemy of academic study. In fact, it's precisely the kind of woolly thinking that I ran from screaming all those years ago. Seriously, I know it might be convincing when you're telling yourself this crap, but trust me, from the outside it's... Well, it's clearly bullshit.”
“You've been out of the field for twenty-odd years,” Douglas pointed out. “You have no idea -”
“What do you know about the Myrkia?” Robert asked suddenly, finally getting to the matter he'd been circling ever since Douglas had pulled up outside the house a few minutes earlier. He felt a little embarrassed bringing the subject up, but he knew Douglas still had his uses.
“It's some crackpot book written by an eighteenth century demonologist.”
“You've read it?”
“Parts of it. It's pretty impenetrable, full of vague, meandering claims. I think the idea behind it was that the author claimed to have done the whole thing through some form of automatic writing. This was long before Taine and people like that. The Myrkia is basically supposed to be a description of the world of the dead, isn't it? Almost like an atlas or an encyclopedia.” He paused for a moment. “Why?”
“I read it in college,” Robert replied, heading over to another workbench and picking up some print-outs, before setting them back down again and turning to Douglas. “It's a baffling text. The ravings of a madman, you might say.”
“Widely dismissed, I believe?”
Robert nodded.
“And extremely obscure.”
He nodded again.
“So why the sudden interest?”
“There's a part in it,” Robert continued, “about a wall.”
“There are parts in lots of books about walls.”
“Hear me out, Doug. There's a part in the book that describes a vast wall made up of the souls of the living. According to the author of the Myrkia, dead souls sometimes try to climb that wall and find a way to break through. There was even a scratchy little drawing showing eye holes and mouth holes on the wall, with the dead people looking through those holes so they could see into the land of the living, like...”
“Like they're in some schlocky old horror movie?”
“I remember reading about that wall a long time ago, back when I was still involved in this kind of thing. It's one of the few things that really stuck with me.”
“So?”
“So how many people in the world today do you think have read the Myrkia? How many do you think have even heard of it? Twenty? Thirty? It's not online, it's too obscure to even have a Wikipedia page. You sure as hell can't buy a copy. Hell, it's not even in the British Library.”
“Almost no-one has read that pile of crap,” Douglas replied. “I know you think I'm rather gullible, Rob, but even I wrote the Myrkia off a long time ago.”
“So how did Emily Stone describe that wall to me twenty-four years ago?”
“Come again?”
“The dead place she mentioned in the interviews I conducted... It sounded a lot like the world described in the Myrkia.”
Douglas paused. “I guess might be a few similarities, but nothing concrete, nothing a child with an overactive imagination couldn't come up with.”
“But she was so insistent,” Robert continued, “and she went into quite a lot of detail about it, more so than any other parts of the story. She described the land of the dead as being a full world, with different parts, different areas, different types of soul. That's straight out of the Myrkia.”
“And?” Douglas waited for a reply. “You're not actually thinking of taking her seriously again, are you?”
“No, of course not, but...”
“But?”
“Since all of this cropped up again,” he continued, “I've been taking another spin through the tapes, and I keep coming back to something that I noticed all those years ago. The way Emily talked about her first encounter with the spirit in this house is very different to the way she talked about all the other events. With the benefit of hindsight, I can absolutely tell that she's lying when it comes to 99% of the things she says, it's as clear as day. But when it comes to that first night, the very first encounter with the entity, there's a different tone in her voice, and the story just seems to fit together in some other way.”
“You think that part was real?”
“She said as much yesterday.”
“When she was trying to get you back on her side?”
“Even if that part wasn't real,” he continued, “maybe she at least thinks it's real. If you look at her heart-rate from the interviews, it was always characterized by brief, sudden spikes and troughs, whereas when she was talking about the first night, and about this dead place idea, her pulse was much more consistently elevated, as if... Something was different. In that little girl's mind, something else was going on during that first night, compared to everything else.”
“And s
he told you all this yesterday?”
“She said there was a germ of truth in it all. That something really happened, and her mother built the hoax on top of it all.”
“Sounds convenient.”
“Of course, she's hardly a reliable witness,” he admitted. “I've already managed to prove that today with the photo trick, but I guess it would be closed-minded of me to ignore the possibility that there might be some truth mixed in with everything else. At the very least, I should wait and see if she -”
Hearing a key in the front door, he looked through to the hallway. He checked his watch and saw that Emily was home with just a couple of minutes to spare before her curfew kicked in again.
“The lady herself,” Douglas muttered.
“Let me deal with her,” Robert whispered to him, “and whatever you do, don't mention anything I've told you so far.”
“There's no sign of her,” Emily called out as she hurried through from the hallway. “I need you to tell me where this care home is, so I can -”
Stopping as soon as she saw Douglas and the machine on the table, she froze for a moment before turning to Robert.
“It's time to get answers once and for all,” he told her. “If this house is really haunted, we're going to find out tonight. If it's not... Well, we'll find that out instead.”
***
“And one here,” Douglas said a short while later, as he taped a sensor to the back of Emily's neck. “Sorry if they're a little cold.”
“It's fine,” she replied, staring at the machine. “What exactly does this do, again?”
“Lots of things,” he explained with a faint smile as he headed to the table and gathered up some papers. “I call it my all-in-one ghost detector. Patent pending. There's more tech packed into this unit than you'd get in most full-sized laboratories. We can -”
Hearing a bump upstairs, he looked at the ceiling.
“What's Doctor Slocombe doing up there?” Emily asked.
“God knows,” Douglas muttered, turning to her. “Banging about like a ghost, from the sound of things. He's not really expecting anything to happen tonight.”
“But you are?”
“I keep a more open mind,” he replied.
“I saw the woman in the photo,” Emily continued earnestly. “It's her, it's the woman I saw when I was younger.”
“It is, huh?” Douglas said, with a sad smile. “Well, I'm sure you really believe that.” As he heard Robert hurrying downstairs, he made some more adjustments to the machine. “Our personal beliefs don't matter too much,” he continued. “We need to put them aside and focus on the science. Doctor Slocombe and I might be coming at this from two different directions, but we're converging on a common point. We both want to know the truth about what's been happening in this house. So far, the whole thing has been rather convoluted, don't you think?”
“And we have to find Lizzie,” Emily added. “That's all that matters.” She paused for a moment. “Actually, can I tell you something? I think you should know, but I don't want Doctor Slocombe to find out.”
“What is it?”
“Earlier -”
“I finished a sweep of the house,” Robert announced as he entered the room. “I'm pretty sure there's zero chance of a cat leaping out of a cupboard to give us all heart-attacks. I also made sure there's no chance of anyone hiding anywhere, and that includes Lizzie.”
“So what's the plan, exactly?” Emily asked, turning to him. “How are you going to get Mary Meacham to speak to us?”
Robert glanced at Douglas, and they shared an uncomfortable glance for a moment.
“What?” Emily continued. “Is there something you guys aren't telling me?”
“Not at all,” Robert continued. “We just need to be patient. This isn't like a seance, so we aren't going to be lowering the lights and inviting the spirits to join us. It's more a case of waiting to see if anything happens of its own accord.”
“How frequent have the unusual events been over the past few weeks?” Douglas asked, adjusting a dial on the front of the machine.
“Almost every night,” she replied. “Pretty regular.”
“Then hopefully we'll get something,” he muttered. “Your heart-rate's steady.”
“At least this time I don't have a thumb-tack in my shoe,” she told him.
“A what?” Robert asked, turning to her.
“Back when you interviewed me twenty-four years ago,” she continued, “my mother used to make me put a thumb-tack in my shoe. At certain points, she'd give me a little signal and I'd have to push my foot down on the pin. It was one of the ways she wanted to make me seem genuinely upset, and it used to cause those spikes in my heart-rate that you noticed.” She paused. “I still have a few little scars down there.”
“Huh,” he replied, “well... That's lovely, isn't it? And this woman never won a single prize for her outstanding parenting skills?”
“You should have seen us when we were faking those photos,” she added. “I used to have to throw myself through the air like a doll. This was in the day before digital cameras, so we'd just use up a roll of film and hope for the best. We got them developed at Boots. She used to go on and on about the cost. Sometimes a whole roll would be a dud, and she'd...”
Robert waited for her to continue. “And she'd what?” he asked finally.
She shook her head.
“Did she hit you?”
“No, of course not.” She paused. “She'd sulk. For hours, sometimes a couple of days. It was like, if I didn't lie well enough, she thought I was trying to sabotage her plans.”
“So you'd try harder the next time?”
She nodded.
“Sounds like a fun childhood,” Robert muttered. “Thankfully it's much cheaper for people to fake a haunting these days. All you need is Photoshop or Gimp, a little imagination, and the balls to lie to the world.”
“Are we ready?” Douglas asked.
“You realize this is it, don't you?” Robert continued, turning to Emily. “Tonight's the night, it's put-up or shut-up time, we're drawing a line under the whole goddamn thing. If there's any kind of paranormal activity here, anything at all, we will get some kind of proof.”
“I just want my daughter back,” she told him. “I don't care about the rest of it, not now. I don't even care if you believe me, and I sure as hell don't want to be in any newspapers. I just have to find Lizzie.”
“Then we'll begin,” Douglas said, flicking a switch on the front of the machine before turning to Emily. “Doctor Slocombe and I will wait out in the car, to avoid interfering with anything, but you have the earpiece and the microphone, Emily, so we'll be in constant contact. Just go about your usual routine and hopefully we'll catch something on one of the machines.”
“But -” Looking around the room, she seemed lost for a moment.
“Something wrong?” Robert asked.
“It's just -” She turned to him. “I don't know what to do without Lizzie around. I usually spend my evenings looking after her, talking to her, watching things with her, helping her do her homework. I know that sounds boring, like I don't have a life, but it's been a long time since I just...”
Her voice trailed off.
“Do your best,” Robert replied, before turning to Douglas. “Come on. We should get started.”
***
“This is bullshit,” Robert muttered, as he and Douglas sat in the dark car and watched the house from a distance. “I'm going to the corner shop for cigarettes. You coming?”
“I'm pretty sure someone should stay here in case she needs us,” Douglas replied.
“Whatever.”
As Robert climbed out of the car and slammed the door shut, Douglas grabbed the microphone and switched it on.
“Just checking in,” he said. “How are things going in there, Emily?”
“I'm fine,” she replied. “Nothing's happened. How are you guys doing?”
“We're having a whale of a time,” h
e told her, watching as Robert made his way along the dark street. “Doctor Slocombe's just stepped out for some fresh air, so I'm sitting here alone.”
“So he can't hear me right now?”
“What's wrong?”
“Nothing, it's just...” She paused, as the line buzzed for a moment. “I feel like I need to tell you something, but you can't tell him. He'd probably get really angry and call the whole thing off.” Another pause. “I lied to Doctor Slocombe earlier today.”
“About what?”
“It's stupid, but he showed me this photo of some woman named Mary. He said he thought she was the woman who's haunting this house, and I told him I recognized her. I told him she was the woman I saw when I was a kid, I really laid it on thick.”
Douglas waited for her to continue. “And... what was the lie?”
“She wasn't the woman,” she continued. “I've never seen the woman in that photo in my life, and she definitely wasn't the woman I saw when I was younger. I just panicked. I figured that if I told him I hadn't seen her, he'd think the whole thing was another hoax. I know I shouldn't have lied, but...” She paused again. “Do you think I should tell him the truth?”
“I think...” Staring at the house for a moment, he tried to imagine how Robert would react. “Keep it to yourself for now. It's good that you told me, though. It might be relevant at some point. There's probably -”
He stopped as he saw a shadow moving across one of the dark upstairs windows in the house.
“Are you upstairs?” he asked, as a shiver passed up his spine.
“I'm in the front room,” she replied. “I know I should go to bed, but I'm just sitting here, reading. I'll go soon.”
“Uh-huh,” he muttered, opening one of the laptops and bringing up the feed from the cameras. Sure enough, they showed Emily sitting on the sofa with a book on her lap. Glancing at the house again, he saw that there was no longer a shadow in the upstairs window, but he was certain he'd seen something a moment ago and he knew there was no way Emily could have got down to the sofa so quickly.