Lost Souls

by Neil White

  ‘But what could you have done to change it?’ I asked, moved by her despair.

  Maggie’s fingers dug deep into mine. ‘All I know is that I did nothing, and all those children died.’

  ‘There were others.’ It was a male voice.

  I whirled around, surprised. I had forgotten for a few seconds that other people were there, transported by Maggie’s story, and when I looked I found myself staring into deep brown eyes, hostile behind dark-rimmed glasses.

  Chapter Thirty

  Terry McKay was dozing, sitting on a bench, a bottle of sherry on the floor, when he felt someone kick his feet.

  He opened his eyes slowly, squinting as he tried to focus. He saw a figure in a black suit.

  ‘What?’ Terry growled, and reached down for the sherry.

  He wasn’t fast enough. A foot kicked it away. What was left in the bottle spilled onto the ground and ran towards the small patch of grass behind the bench.

  Terry stood up quickly, swaying, and then shouted, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘Are you waiting for Jimmy King?’ came the question, the voice hoarse and low.

  Terry stopped, surprised. ‘Yeah, where is he?’

  The figure in the suit laughed. ‘Did you think he was going to sit in public with you, with that cheap shit next to you?’

  ‘So what the fuck is going on?’

  ‘You come with me and speak to Jimmy in private.’

  Terry chuckled, and spittle jumped onto his lips. ‘What, like a date or something?’ He waved his hands in the air in mock excitement and screamed in a falsetto screech, ‘I’ll have the lobster, Jimmy.’ He was the only one who laughed.

  The figure in the suit turned to walk away. ‘Your five grand, mate, not mine.’

  Terry watched him retreat. He looked back at the floor. His mind worked hard as he thought about how he was going to replace the drink. The shops knew him now, and so it was hard enough to steal when he was sober. Drunk, he had no chance. He looked again at the figure in the suit. He was shrinking into the distance. He knew it was dangerous, had heard all about Jimmy King. But his thoughts turned first to the money.

  ‘Wait!’ he shouted.

  The figure stopped and then turned around slowly. Terry held out his arms to steady himself and then he set off towards him.

  ‘What do you mean there were others?’ I asked.

  The man with the deep brown eyes came around to face me, his eyes never leaving mine. His jaw looked set firm, his mouth curled downwards in a snarl.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked. He said it like a challenge.

  I introduced myself and held my hand out for him to shake. He didn’t take it or smile but sat down and eyed me with suspicion.

  ‘I’m Billy Hunt,’ he said, as if I ought to recognise his name.

  Then I noticed two others in the room, a tall man in his late twenties, well-built with an easy smile and short blond hair, and a woman who was slightly younger. Her short hair was dark and spiky with red flashes, and she wore mock-combats and a tight white T-shirt. When she smiled, her eyes flashed like silver buttons.

  ‘And I’m Dan,’ the blond man said. ‘Dan Kinsella, and this is Charlotte.’

  Charlotte grinned as she shook hands with me. ‘Call me Charlie.’

  ‘Billy is right about Aberfan,’ said Dan. ‘People did dream about it before it happened, but they only came forward afterwards. Have you ever heard of the Central Premonitions Bureau?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Not many people have,’ Dan continued, ‘but so many people dreamt about Aberfan before it happened that people started to take it seriously and the Central Premonitions Bureau was set up. People were asked to register their premonitions, just in case someone might spot a pattern. Aberfan broke everyone’s heart, and if people had known what the dreams meant in advance, then those children might not have died.’

  I scribbled it all down in my notebook. ‘Don’t people always come forward with tales of premonitions when disasters happen?’ I said. ‘But what about all the unfulfilled premonitions? A few hits and millions of misses is nothing at all. It’s just coincidence.’

  ‘It wasn’t nothing to me,’ said Maggie.

  ‘Some lived a long way from the village,’ said Dan, ‘but there was one little girl from Aberfan who dreamt about it just two days before it happened. Eryl Mai Jones. Ten years old. She had a dream that the school was no longer there, that something black had come down over it. Just two days later, it did.’

  ‘But that could just be the overactive imagination of a child,’ I argued, trying not to sound scornful. ‘Just think what she went through. Her mind would have been all over the place.’

  Dan looked at me, a sad expression on his face.

  ‘She didn’t come through anything,’ he said softly. ‘Eryl Mai Jones died at Aberfan. It was her mother who told everyone about her dream afterwards.’

  I couldn’t respond to that, didn’t even try. Dan nodded at me, like he understood why I was lost for words. Then he clapped his hands.

  ‘C’mon, everyone, let’s get this meeting underway.’

  There was a scraping of metal as chairs were pulled into a circle, and then the main lights were turned off, so that the only light came from candles that Charlie had placed by the serving hatch. They made the faces of everyone become distorted in the light, flickering shadows like Halloween lanterns.

  It was Dan who led.

  ‘Before we start, let us remember poor Jess,’ he said. ‘If everyone can be silent for a minute so that we can all remember how she was in life, before we talk about what we may have seen of her death.’

  Everyone looked down. I saw two of the old ladies pull handkerchiefs from the sleeves of their cardigans. When I looked over at Eric, his eyes were trained on the floor. I listened to the noises in the room, the sniffles, the sighs, everyone wrapped up in their memories, but Eric remained stock still.

  It was Dan who spoke first, his voice tender.

  ‘We will need to talk about our dreams,’ he said. ‘We need to know whether anything else is going to happen. Jess was one of us and she’s dead. Is anyone else in danger?’

  I heard the old ladies gasp, not having made a connection between Jess and the gift they all allegedly shared, but I sensed guilt from the others in the room, as if somehow they had missed an opportunity to prevent the murder.

  Dan held his hands out. ‘Who wants to go first?’

  It was Lily who spoke up.

  ‘I’ve been sleeping badly,’ she said. ‘I wake up in a big house, and I can hear a child crying. I try and help, follow the sound, but I never get there. It’s always just through the next door, in the next room, but I’m too scared to go on, too scared to go back. I don’t know how I got there, but it feels like I am looking for something I can’t find, and I’m crying. Maybe not out loud, but in my head I am screaming.’

  I noticed that Eric was staring at her, transfixed, and then I remembered that he had told me something similar in the café. ‘What happens next?’ I asked quietly, pulled in by her tale.

  ‘I feel like I’m falling and then I wake up,’ she said.

  ‘Who do you think you are in the dream?’ I tried to sound disinterested, just polite, but I had noticed the effect it had had on Eric.

  Lily shook her head, and I saw fear in her eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

  The rest of the group exchanged glances, but no one else spoke. I could sense the nervousness in the room. Dan broke the silence by asking, ‘Did anyone else dream anything unusual this week?’

  Billy Hunt spoke up.

  ‘I saw a tramp hanging,’ he said.

  Everyone looked at him, surprised.

  ‘A tramp?’ asked Charlie.

  Billy scowled. ‘Yeah, that’s what I saw, and it made me shoot awake. It came at the end of a normal dream.’ As he looked around, he held up a scrap of paper. ‘I wrote it down,’ he said, and when no one responded, he coughed lightly and began to r
ead:

  ‘Parachuting. Climbing a mountain, maybe a hill, surrounded by friends. And then I’m soaring, on a parachute, the world below me. Everything is small, but I am gliding, not coming down, just flying along. But then I get lower, and the world gets bigger. And the little dots on the floor become people in the world, and as I get nearer they are pointing at me, because I’m flying above them. But I’m getting lower, lower, all the time getting nearer. And they point more. But they are smiling, not laughing.’

  Billy looked up from his piece of paper.

  ‘Then it changed really quickly,’ he said, and carried on reading.

  ‘As I came in to land, it got dark and cold, and there were no more people. The street was long and thin and quiet, and then at the end, just in midair, a worn-out man is hanging, his legs limp, his head loose on one side.’

  ‘Who did you think it was?’ asked Dan.

  ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his feet swinging, and I could tell that he was dead.’ He looked away defensively. ‘Then I woke up.’

  ‘When did you dream this?’

  ‘This morning.’

  Dan sat back and looked around the group. ‘Anyone had anything similar?’

  Everyone shook their heads.

  ‘Did you have any idea of where this person was?’ asked Dan.

  Billy shook his head. ‘I knew it was something bad, but I can’t tell you anything else. I didn’t recognise anything, or anyone.’ He sat back, his arms folded. He seemed hostile, defensive.

  I watched Billy Hunt carefully. He had opened up briefly, had become animated, but now he was back to the surly person he had been a few moments earlier. I looked back over at Eric, and I remembered how he had been when I’d first met him, a scruffy, frightened old man. Was he the tramp? Then I looked away when he glanced in my direction. Maybe it was nothing.

  Sam turned on his engine when he saw Alison’s car pull out of the car park.

  He had been waiting for her, wanting to see where she went. He checked his watch. A late finish, even for the golden girl. A late-night meeting with Harry? She had been in his office a lot more than usual, and whenever Harry appeared it seemed like she wasn’t far away. Solicitors were manoeuvring for position at Parsons, with Harry’s retirement imminent. Harry had found out about Terry McKay quickly enough, and now the file was gone. And Harry had a vested interest in making the file go away. Was this Alison’s way of nudging herself forward in the queue for Harry’s affection?

  Alison lived in an apartment in a converted wharf building, a short drive from the office, with hardwood floors and a balcony view over the canal. He let her get into the traffic flow and then went through a red light so that he was just a few cars behind.

  She did the short circuit of the ring road. He gripped his steering wheel in anticipation as she approached the turning that would take her on the road towards Harry’s house, but she kept going straight ahead.

  He settled in behind her, just one car between them. He saw her turn left at some traffic lights, and he realised that she was heading home. He thought about turning around, but he wanted to see if anyone would visit.

  He slowed down and saw that she had parked near the front entrance to her apartment building. He drove past and then came to a stop quietly further along the street. He turned round in his seat and watched her as she climbed out of her car and then fished in her bag for her keys.

  Sam turned off his headlights and the street turned ominously dark.

  I watched Billy as the meeting wound up. He hadn’t said much after the account of his own dream, almost as if he was embarrassed. He didn’t seem to fit in as well as the others.

  I went to speak to Eric, who was cleaning the kitchen.

  ‘We can use the hut for free,’ he said, ‘provided we keep it clean.’ He finished wiping the surface and then turned around to face me. ‘What did you think?’

  I leaned against a work surface, a small patch of fake granite. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re not a believer, are you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘But you came here, to hear things you don’t believe?’

  I shrugged at that. ‘I don’t have to believe it to write it.’

  ‘But if you tell it like you believe it, isn’t that like lying?’

  ‘Only if it’s untrue.’ I paused, and then said, ‘Is it untrue?’

  Eric put the cloth down. ‘Sam Nixon is in danger. I feel it as strong as anything I’ve ever felt. I just don’t know why or when.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s the tramp,’ I said jokingly, but Eric didn’t smile.

  ‘Don’t worry too much about Billy,’ Eric said. ‘He doesn’t contribute much. He’s just lonely, I think, which is sad for a man his age. He goes along with it, but I don’t think he gets dreams like we do.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t describe the emotions everyone else does when we have the dreams. It’s not just the images. It’s the feeling of dread, the panic, the knowledge that you have seen something. Billy has never said what he feels; just what he sees. He just dreams, like most people do.’

  ‘So it’s a gift the rest of you have?’

  Eric shook his head. ‘No, a curse.’

  ‘It’s a curse for us all,’ said a voice.

  I whirled around. It was Dan.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

  Dan snorted a laugh. ‘Can you imagine what it feels like to see something you couldn’t do anything about?’ He went to help Eric tidy up. ‘I’m glad I found these people. I thought I was going mad.’

  ‘But maybe they were just vivid dreams. You don’t really know they predict the future.’

  Dan’s eyes narrowed. ‘I have normal dreams too. Not every dream is precognitive. But I can tell the difference. I can feel them, see them clearly, almost feel the pain in them.’

  ‘So how did you find out about other people?’

  ‘My doctor,’ Dan replied. ‘I was desperate when I went, but he knew people who’d had similar experiences, and he directed me here.’ He smiled. ‘It saved my life.’

  I saw that Eric had turned away, found some more cleaning to do that stopped me from seeing his face. ‘When Lily described her dream,’ I said to him, ‘with the big house and the falling, I saw your face. I saw something—fear, I thought.’

  Eric didn’t respond. He just carried on cleaning, but I saw his hand slow down.

  ‘Were you scared, Eric?’ I asked.

  He turned round to look at me and said quietly, ‘I’ve been having that dream. It wakes me up, just like it does with Lily.’

  ‘Does she know you have it too?’

  He shook his head.

  Dan looked towards Eric, and then winked at me. ‘Time to go,’ and then he walked away, back into the room.

  I watched Dan wave goodbye to Lily, Bessie and Maggie, before linking arms with Charlie as they went outside. Billy didn’t go with them. He watched the door close and then turned back into the room, and there was sadness in his look. I recognised it: he liked Charlie.

  ‘How much have you told the police about your other dream?’ I asked Eric. ‘The one about Jess?’

  Eric stared at me with suspicion, but then he looked down and shook his head. ‘Nothing yet.’ Then he looked up. ‘Are you going to write about me?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Can I speak to you again?’

  Eric smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, of course, but promise me one thing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Tell Sam Nixon to be careful.’

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Terry looked out of the car window as they headed out of Blackley, to a network of tight terraced streets, redbrick, derelict, the windows boarded up. There were still some families left, waiting to be re-housed, but this was an area ready to be flattened. It was Jimmy King’s domain, whole streets bought up and sold for redevelopment. Anyone who resisted a move out received advice t
hey couldn’t ignore.

  Terry looked at the back of the driver’s shining bald head, his skin gleaming deep red, his neck wide, the folds at the back of his head thick. Terry looked at the hands on the wheel, large callused knuckles, the grip tight, the shirt-cuffs straining against his forearms.