Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  “Brave boy, to call me out,” Bailey Jensen said. “Stupid boy, to think you can face me. You think I’m just another ghost, don’t you? You don’t know what I am.”

  “I know what you are,” Julian said. “You’re someone who knew just enough about death to trap a walker of the mortal edge.” The cat strolled to his side and stared at Bailey Jensen. “You killed yourself – right here – to fuel the magic. In so doing, you made yourself a place between life and death. Too afraid of dying, were you?”

  Blackness churned behind Bailey Jensen. A wave of blood-freezing fear rolled out of him, but it broke around Julian. “Death chose me. Me! I died at the Somme, but then I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t meant to leave this world. I was chosen to stay.”

  “You need sacrifices to hold the walker here,” Julian said. “One per year, and their ghosts remain trapped here as well. You scare them to death, I take it?”

  “Most of them,” Bailey Jensen said. “Most kill themselves, when the dead are upon them and the doors won’t let them out at night. But some need to die the old-fashioned way.”

  An old typewriter leapt off one of the shelves and threw itself at Julian. He flicked his hand and the typewriter was smashed apart in mid-air, its pieces showering to the floor near the boiler.

  The chain of the bike snaked into the air, shedding flakes of rust. It tried to noose itself around Julian’s neck. He caught it with one hand and it twisted around his forearm. Julian spoke and it flared white and vanished.

  Bailey Jensen roared at him. Every ghost in the house, all the ones he’d seen and a few he had not, appeared in the cellar. They stretched out further than the solid walls allowed, limited only by the barrier that had been created around the house. The ghosts screamed.

  Julian stepped forward and raised his hand over the old, black bloodstain, palm facing down. His light swung under his curled fingers. It contracted into a point of light so bright even the dead couldn’t look at it.

  To Bailey Jensen he said, “Did I tell you what happens to ghosts in London?”

  Chapter 2 – Rob, Monday Night

  Rob had met plenty of new people in London but he was having trouble making friends, so he joined a cult.

  He didn’t want anything unreasonable, or so he thought: a good job, friends to head to the pub with, a flat that wasn’t a complete dump and a solid cage to lock himself in three nights a month. Half the world passed through London. If there was anywhere in England that he could make it work it should be there, but it wasn’t coming together for him.

  He tried the people in London who were like him, who had the same secret he did, but they didn’t want anything to do with him and they wouldn’t explain why.

  He hadn’t clicked with anybody at work. On one hand there were people like Jenny from accounting, who could spend an hour talking about cakes past and future. On the other hand there was Dean, who worked the same customer service job as Rob but who had been with the company longer. He looked like he was working out the distance to Rob’s jugular every time they spoke.

  His flatmate was a young Irishman of extremes. He was either in an extremely good mood or an extremely bad one. He kept extremely odd hours working extremely long shifts at a job he would only say kept him in beer money.

  His college friends had rocketed off in entirely different directions. His school friends had vanished either at the beginning or the end of his gap year of travel.

  He was getting desperate by the time he found the ad for the Cult of the Star-Shaped Eye. It was online if you knew where to look. Their website talked a lot about transcending the human state and opening the mind beyond the limits of space and time. It probably meant chanting and wearing a robe, but he needed to try something new and so he was determined to give them a go.

  He exchanged emails with a woman named Laura who used a lot of exclamation marks. She told him to come along to the next meeting at a hotel in Paddington and he turned up after work, intending to keep a straight face no matter what. But the meeting was a surprise.

  It was the greatest sales pitch he’d ever heard. He listened with his mouth hanging open. When it ended, he stood and applauded with everyone else.

  Those at the meeting split up into small groups, laughing and chatting amongst themselves. As he was the only new person at the gathering, the cult leader homed in on him.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Rob.” Gregory Ferguson could have been an army drill-sergeant. He was almost as tall and broad-shouldered as Rob, with a full head of iron-grey hair and a grip like an industrial vice. Gregory smelled of aftershave and the talcum powder he must use to keep his palms dry. “Glad to have you here at our little gathering. What do you think so far?”

  “You’re a great speaker, Mister Ferguson,” Rob said, carefully matching his grip.

  “It’s Gregory, Rob, we’re all friends here. I hope some of what I said spoke to you. You strike me as a good fit for our little group.”

  The speech had begun with a warm greeting to the twenty-eight people sitting in the small function room. It had dwelt for a time on the complexity of the modern world and the difficulties of navigating its dangers, accompanied by a soundtrack of brooding string instruments piped in through surround-sound speakers.

  When the music swelled with defiance, Gregory stood with his feet planted firmly on the stage, chest thrust outwards, a pillar of vital strength. A blare of trumpets accompanied the offer of hope: order, structure, purpose, all within reach to those who opened themselves to the truth as seen by the Star-Shaped Eye. Those in the small crowd pumped their fists in the air and cheered over the crash of rock music.

  Rob wished he was half as good a salesman.

  “Come meet the wife,” Gregory said, clamping a hand on his shoulder. “Laura, say hi to our newest member.”

  Gregory just assumed that the sale was a done deal. Rob wished he could take notes. This was better than any lecture or workshop he’d attended in his entire college course on account management.

  Laura Ferguson, with her hair up and her glasses on and her business suit, made Rob think the words ‘sexy librarian’ even though he’d only ever found himself in a library by accident. Her scent was lipstick and expensive perfume, though not cloyingly so. She had introduced Gregory at the start of the meeting as if tonight were the greatest night of her life.

  “Hi Rob.” She took his hand in both of hers. “We spoke by email. Delighted to meet you. We’re all so glad you decided to come along tonight. Isn’t it great, what we have here?”

  “It’s remarkable,” Rob said. Gregory put his arm around Laura’s waist and beamed at her. This too, Rob saw, was part of the pitch. It could be you, they were telling him, bristling with masculine strength, married to a sexy librarian and surrounded by lots of people who hung on your every word.

  Rob glanced over his shoulder at a metallic crash. The grinning couple in their early thirties, the ones who had handed out name tags at the door, were clearing chairs to the sides of the room in preparation for the next phase of the meeting. A few of the other meeting attendees moved to help them.

  “So where are you from, Rob?” Gregory leaned in a little. “Tell us about yourself. Not from London, are you?”

  Rob shrugged. “Who is?”

  They laughed. “It does look like that sometimes, doesn’t it?” Laura said. “So many different people from all over the world filter through London. It barely feels like home, some days.”

  “I can hear a hint of Manchester in your accent,” Gregory said. “It’s been a few years since we’ve been up there, hasn’t it dear?”

  She nodded. “We had a fine meal in a proper, old-fashioned British pub.”

  “They made a damned fine steak,” Gregory said. They both laughed. Rob laughed too because it was impossible not to.

  The chairs had been cleared and Rob saw hooded cloaks being handed out. They were doing silly robes after all, but he wasn’t feeling so bad about that after Gregory’s sermon. The sharp smell of matc
hes tickled his nose, followed by the waxy smoke of candles.

  Gregory’s hand clamped onto his shoulder again. “To truly welcome you into the group, Rob, we have a little initiation ceremony we go through. Don’t worry, your part is just to stand there and feel welcome.” His clear blue eyes grew distant. “It’s important to mark the stages of life as we transition through it. We have so few ceremonies in our lives. We’ve lost something, giving those up.” He focused back on Rob. “Don’t you agree, Rob?”

  “Sure do,” Rob said.

  “Here you go, Rob.” Laura reached up and slipped a cloak around his shoulders, over his suit jacket. She stood in front of him and tied the strings in a neat bow, surrounding him in a cloud of her perfume. She smelled nervous and out of habit Rob worried that he had given himself away somehow, that she knew what he was.

  He noticed that while everyone else’s cloak was black, his was red.

  “There, all done,” Laura said. “Now you’re ready to join us.”

  The lights were turned down. The cultists gathered together in a half-circle, each holding a candle, each person a Londoner battered by the machinery of the modern world. They pulled their hoods up all at the same time, retreating into the shadows. Rob stood at the front of the room with Gregory on his left and Laura on his right.

  “Brothers and sisters.” Gregory’s voice was no longer full of fire. Now it wove a gentle, intimate web. “Call out with your minds. Call out to the one who guides us. Call out to Baelanoth, the Star-Shaped Eye.”

  “Baelanoth,” the cultists said as one.

  Rob tugged at his robe and tried to stand still.

  “Call out to the Eye who sees the true workings of time,” Gregory said. “Make this place sacred to him. Call out to him and let his Eye open within each of us.”

  “Baelanoth.”

  The hairs stood up on the back of Rob’s neck. The candle flames and flickered and then were drawn towards the centre of the circle.

  “Call out for his guidance. Call out for his wisdom. Call out to him and let him show us all the way.”

  “Baelanoth.”

  The space in the middle of the circle began to twist and fold.

  Rob became aware that two of the larger cult members had given their candles to others and had moved around behind him. They both smelled of soaped-off gym sweat. They both felt like threats.

  A shiver ran all across his skin, all through his muscles, all through his bones. His senses narrowed down on the two men. The sound of their breathing. The rustling of their robes. A familiar surge of strength rose up within him and he took a deep breath and held that strength in check, even as the two men behind him grabbed his upper arms.

  Gregory turned around with a knife in his hand. At the same time, a giant ghostly eye opened in the centre of the circle. Its pupil was the shape of a million-pointed star. It looked right at him.

  Whatever it might be, wherever it might be, Rob felt sure it saw right through him and, unlike everyone else in the room, it knew that he was a monster.

  “I’m not the new recruit. I’m the sacrifice, aren’t I?” A thin iron chain hung around Rob’s right wrist. With his left hand, he pushed his sleeve up and put his fingers on the iron chain’s catch.

  Gregory donned his big, toothy grin. “Got it in one there, Rob.”

  “I’d really like to resolve this without violence.” His jaw muscles rippled. His fingernails were tingling. “Just for a change.”

  “Not going to happen, Rob.” Gregory took position in front of Rob and raised the knife high over his head.

  “Bollocks,” Rob said. He twisted the catch on the iron chain and it came free.

  The Underground had shut down for the night by the time he got out of there. He racked his brain trying to remember where he usually caught a Night Bus home from and a beer-drenched post-pub memory surfaced. He waited for just under ten minutes for the bus to arrive.

  He took a seat and surreptitiously sized up his fellow passengers. A neatly dressed middle-aged man in a pale jacket sat across the aisle from Rob, doing the Sudoku puzzle in one of the free evening papers. A girl up near the front stared at her phone, messaging or playing games. Several people wore ear buds to shut out the bus with a cloud of music. One teenage guy with the kind of untidy hair that required a lot of gel wore bulky silver headphones.

  No one paid any attention to him.

  His tangle of brown hair stuck up in all directions despite his best efforts to comb it down with his fingers. The coat he’d picked left his wrists exposed but it hid the ridiculous green cardigan he’d pulled off one of the cultists. The trousers he’d chosen weren’t long enough to conceal his lack of socks. The shoes he wore were the right size, more or less. A pair of socks would have made them a lot more comfortable, but he drew the line at wearing other peoples’ unwashed socks, whether they were alive or dead. His chain was back on his right wrist.

  Rob thought he stank of blood, but no one was making a fuss.

  A burly guy with eastern European cheekbones got on at the next stop and sat three rows up eating a doner kebab. Rob’s mouth watered. The smell of the kebab pushed every other thought out of his head. He’d resisted the urge to feed back at the hotel function room and he was ravenous.

  At the next stop, a kid with his jeans deliberately pulled halfway down boarded. He waddled penguin-style down to the back of the bus, pulled out his phone and set it to play tinny R&B music.

  Rob sighed, thinking of the ear buds for his phone that he’d left at the office, and quite by accident met the bespectacled gaze of the middle-aged Sudoku player. The man tapped his pen to his lips. He drew a pattern Rob couldn’t make out on his paper.

  The kid’s phone squawked and fell silent.

  Rob forgot that he was trying to avoid drawing attention and turned around to look. The kid shook his phone and swore at it. Rob glanced at the Sudoku player and the man raised an eyebrow in reply.

  Rob faced forward again and tried to keep the big grin off his face. He hadn’t seen something like that before in London, though he figured it had to be around. He thought about striking up a conversation with the Sudoku player, but the man was probably doing what Rob was doing, trying to stay low and fit in. Anyway, Rob was in no state to make a good first impression.

  Two thirds of the bus passengers had disembarked by the time Rob got off in Ealing. It was a hike from Uxbridge Road to the place where he lived and he didn’t fancy it in his uncomfortable sockless state, so he pulled the shoes off and dropped them in someone’s recycling bin. The uneven concrete footpath was cold, but cold didn’t bother him much.

  A three-quarters full moon peeked out of the clouds while he walked and the pale light tingled on his skin. He looked up and saw a line of faint light arcing across the sky. He could only ever see it when the moon was out and the further into the centre of the city he went the more of them he saw, like being closer to the centre of a web. Not for the first time, he wondered what they were.

  Flat 1 Hawthorn House was the left-hand half of a two-storey house on a quiet, family-friendly street. Some flats in London shared a front door, but Hawthorn House was like two houses that had sidled up to each other. Even the small front yard was split down the middle by a low brick wall and each yard had its own gate. Rob had upgraded to the flat from a small, grimy share-house in Earl’s Court with temperamental plumbing. The place could do with a fresh coat of paint and a carpet that didn’t smell of decades of dust, but relocating there was one of the few things Rob felt he was getting right in London.

  Before leaving the function room where they’d held the cult meeting, he’d had the presence of mind to grab his keys, phone and wallet from what was left of his clothes. In the twelve months he’d lived in Ealing he had not yet needed to turn up here keyless and hope Kevin the extreme Irishman was home, but he had an excuse or two ready in his head just in case he ever did.

  He slid the key into the lock, took a breath, tallied in his mind the sequence of thi
ngs he needed to do in the next thirty seconds with one or two contingencies in mind, turned the key and rushed inside.

  Past the living room. Up the stairs. Quick, into his room. Rip off the mismatched clothes of dead people. Shove under the bed for later disposal. Towel around the waist. Down the hallway into the bathroom. Bathroom door shut. Bolt thrown into place.

  He let out a long breath. Thank fuck. He could hear Kevin the extreme Irishman’s preferred flavour of dance music thudding through the thin wall between the bathroom and the back bedroom. He probably didn’t even realise Rob was home.

  He felt a lot calmer about things by the time he finished his shower. Sure, the night had been a failure on the making new friends front, but it had been what management at work liked to call a successful failure, meaning that no one’s arse was getting the boot.

  Rob went back downstairs dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. In his ravenous state he was convinced the fridge held a stash of left-over Thai and he meant to inhale it.

  He started eating the Thai without even heating it up in the microwave because he was just too hungry to wait. Should have stopped off for a kebab on the way home and to hell with anyone who thought he was dressed weird. When the enormous hollow in his stomach began to feel like it might, at some point in the future, actually be filled, he checked in the fridge for something to drink.

  He opened a plastic bottle of milk and the sour stench assaulted his nose, making him reel back.

  Clutching the kitchen bench, he held the milk at full arm’s length. Kevin. Kevin. Kevin and the food he kept leaving in the fridge to go off. The stink of it would stay with Rob all the following day. Rob had been polite, he’d been blunt and he’d been downright rude. Now he’d had enough.

  “Kevin!” he roared at the ceiling.

  “What?” Kevin said from behind him.

  “Fuck!”

  A mad tremble went all through Rob, through flesh and bone, but with his free hand he grabbed the iron chain around his wrist and stamped it down. He took a breath. “How did you sneak up on me like that?”