The Apparition Phase

by Will Maclean

  Will Maclean

  * * *

  THE APPARITION PHASE

  Contents

  Part I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part II Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part III Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part IV Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Originally from the Wirral, Will Maclean has been fascinated by ghost stories since he was a child, and has been writing them almost as long as he can remember. He’s written for television professionally since 2006, during which time he’s worked as a scriptwriter for people as varied as Alexander Armstrong, Al Murray and Tracey Ullman. He is the writer and creator of the Audible Original paranormal comedy drama series ‘High Strangeness’. He’s written extensively for children’s television, and has been part of writing teams that have picked up two BAFTAs and an International Emmy. He lives in London with his wife and young daughter.

  For Vic

  She didn’t mean to cause a haunting. She was, however, well aware of how the haunting came to be. Some words that define that particular time: “malignant”, “lost”, or, in more paranoid times, “premeditated”.

  High Static, Dead Lines, Kristen Gallerneaux

  I

  * * *

  1

  And so the first thing my twin sister and I did, when we finally got access to a camera of our own, was fake a ghost photograph.

  It was the kind of plan that seemed entirely natural and logical to us, and like so much else that passed between us, the plan was unspoken. I remember both of us being in the attic, in that initial frenzy of creativity, using white chalk to draw on the brown-painted plaster. Almost everything in our house was dark brown, or dark orange, or at least that’s how I remember it now. As children, we used to draw with chalk on that wall all the time, but we were almost fourteen years of age now, and our pursuits were more macabre, if not yet more grown-up. And the attic was ours, it belonged to us, and we could do as we pleased there. Mum never came up, not even to tidy, and Dad only ventured up to tell us to come downstairs, raising a bemused eyebrow at whatever bizarre project we were involved in (and there were usually several on the go at once). And so, up there, our works surrounded us.

  Just as the plan to fake a ghost photograph had been decided between us on some pre-linguistic level, so too was the execution of the drawing itself – the design of our ghost. We spent enough time reading, writing and thinking about ghosts to know precisely what the rules were in this department. Abigail and I were connoisseurs of ghost photographs and ghosts in general, and were very discerning about what was scary and disturbing, and what wasn’t. We had many books on the subject, and although our parents didn’t actively indulge our fascinations, they tolerated them. And if we wanted to read about ghosts and spirits, well, so be it, as long as it meant we were reading.

  Not that our interests were limited to ghosts. We were also interested in standing stones, witches, curses, the British countryside, the ancient Egyptians (with particular emphasis on their burial rites), the Vikings, voodoo, vampires, the mythical giant squid, real-life accounts of people being attacked (and even better, devoured) by large wild animals, Dracula, Doctor Who, space exploration, the futuristic domed cities that people would one day live in on the ocean floor, pond life, medieval history, medieval weaponry, medieval siege warfare, eclipses, coral reefs, escapology, how to start fires, UFOs, card tricks, astronomy, astrology, secret codes and alphabets, invisible ink … and so on. Despite all this, I still think that we were not unusual children. Not for then.

  Ghosts were, however, a perennial fascination for us, and there was nothing we didn’t know about the Drummer of Tedworth, or The Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor, or the Poltergeist of Borley Rectory, and a hundred other strange and peculiar stories. We kept scrapbooks. We swapped opinions, and we wrote earnest monographs on scrap paper. We were experts.

  Abigail and I were in mutual agreement as to the best ghost photographs ever taken. There were many good ones, and we had scrapbooks full of such pictures, but three truly extraordinary ones were in a class of their own. We both knew exactly which books or magazines or newspaper clippings these nightmares were hidden in, and we always proceeded with caution when looking at them, as if the images themselves might leak into our world: into our house, our attic, our very lives.

  Our all-time top three ghost photos were as follows, in reverse order of scariness. They will be instantly familiar, I imagine, to anyone of a certain age:

  3. The Tulip Staircase Ghost

  In 1966, a retired clergyman from British Columbia took a picture of the empty Tulip Staircase in the Queen’s House at Greenwich. And – of course – upon getting the negatives developed, he discovered an image of a spectral figure, ascending the stairs. The figure itself is eerie and sad rather than frightening; there’s something about its pose that has a desperation to it, a palpable fatigue, as it hurls itself once again up the staircase it presumably must hurl itself up for all eternity.

  2. The Chinnery Photograph (aka ‘Dead mother in back of car’)

  The so-called ‘Chinnery photograph’ depicts a man sitting in what first appears to be a hackney cab but is in fact just an old-fashioned car. He wears the perfunctory smile of someone enduring being photographed. Everything about the photo appears banal, apart from the fact that the man’s dead mother-in-law can clearly be seen behind him, on the back seat. Her face is expressionless, but – most terrifying of all – her eyes (or possibly her glasses) are glowing white, without pupils. It is a shocking, unpleasant image. If these patches are indeed her eyes, what has happened to her? What unimaginable things has she seen, to do that to her eyes?

  1. The Ghost Monk of Newby

  The Church of Christ the Consoler, Skelton-cum-Newby, Yorkshire: a black-and-white image of a church altar. Standing on the right-hand side of the image is a figure, brazen and almost defiant, dressed in a long black monk’s cowl. It is tall, this figure, and very long. Everything about it implies length, as if it’s been stretched somehow. It is transparent, and the altar steps and the rear of the church are visible through the figure’s outline. But those are things you only notice later, if you dare, because the first thing that strikes you is the face. The face – such as it is – is a piece of white cloth with ragged eyeholes, like thumbholes in rough clay, with nothing human to refer to at all. Just that horrible, faceless gaze.

  As children, Abigail and I found this image almost transcendentally terrifying, and neither of us were ever able to look at it for long. I had vivid nightmares about that faceless face, an
d used to hide under the hot cavern of my bedclothes on sleepless summer nights, terrified that this tall spectre might be towering over me. The Monk of Newby looks like it intends to cause harm, and offers nothing but malevolence to anyone unlucky enough to cross its path. It was the closest to how we imagined a real ghost might appear.

  So, given our expertise in this area, we were painstaking in the execution of our fake ghost. We were good at drawing, so we worked together, Abigail standing on a chair to do the finer detail of the face – not that there was much detail, or much face – and me working beneath her on the general outline. Our first rule was that it should look roughly human, in shape and size. As tall as possible, without scraping the ceiling. Secondly, we shouldn’t include any specific facial features. Neither of us was good enough an artist to draw a face that would pass as ‘real’ anyway, so the more nebulous it was, the more convincing it would be. We agreed that our ghost would be a creature of smoke, of cobwebs, of moonlight, made of insubstantial mist that faded as soon as it was perceived. Even then, we overdid the face with heavy strokes of chalk, and might have given up entirely had Abigail not spat on the flat edge of her palm and ground the face out in angry slashing strokes. After that happy accident, the face was perfect – a clashing patch of light and shade, like bad weather, with angry, empty eyes. It looked less like a face than several faces competing for the same space. We were pleased, and astute enough to know perfection when we saw it, leaving it untouched thereafter. We filled in the rest of the outline with the same spit-and-shine sfumato that Abigail had brought to the face. When we were done, we took the chair away and examined our work.

  Upon assessing the entire thing, Abi had second thoughts. She argued that it was static, cardboard, not possessed of any kind of animus at all. An observer would suspect they were looking at something inert, something that may not be instantly familiar, but was clearly made, somehow, of familiar things.

  ‘It needs to live,’ she said.

  ‘It can’t,’ I said. ‘It’s dead.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. We need an invocation, Tim. To invite it to exist.’

  We had already spent ages on the drawing, and I just wanted to take the pictures. ‘You do it, then.’

  ‘I will,’ said Abi. She went off to her room and returned five minutes later to present me with a sheet of paper, on which she had written a poem:

  I am not here

  I am not real

  I do not fear

  I do not feel

  I do not eat

  I do not drink

  I do not breathe

  I do not think

  I do not know

  I do not care

  I cast no shadow

  Anywhere –

  I cannot give

  I cannot lie

  I cannot live

  I cannot die

  I am no woman

  Nor a man

  I don’t exist;

  Yet here I am.

  ‘Perfect,’ I said. And it was, somehow. We read it out loud; solemnly, a verse each, a strange little ceremony that made me uneasy, and then we set up the camera.

  We took a whole roll of pictures, which seemed a monstrous extravagance at the time. As we were, when all was said and done, thirteen years old, we didn’t think to take pictures from any other angle than face-on, dead centre, so our images would all be identical. We didn’t tell our parents that we’d made these pictures, of course, and were careful to erase all traces of our ghost with a wet sponge. After we’d done that, I discovered we somehow still had one exposure left, so I took one of Abi, smiling back at me, in front of the now-clean wall.

  We were equally careful when we went to collect the pictures from Boots a fortnight later. Abi distracted Mum by discussing shampoo whilst I paid for the photos and tucked them into the waistband of my trousers, where the glossy packet stuck to my stomach. When we got home, we contrived an excuse to scramble up to the attic as soon as we could, and examine the pictures.

  The photo of Abi had, for some reason, ended up at the top of the stack, despite being the last one taken. Something about her smile made her look much older, much more serious than she was, as if her adult self were staring through at us from some unspecified future point. We both found this hilarious.

  The images of our ghost, too, were different to our expectation of them, but they were not disappointing. What was good about the pictures was that they were strange, they did not immediately make visual sense. You weren’t quite sure what you were seeing. One of them – the one we judged to be the best – was properly creepy, the smudges of chalk suggesting a damaged, furious face in which two awful eyes glared.

  Of course, as the artists and perpetrators of this hoax, we had little perspective on our work, and our opinion was irrelevant. We would need to test it.

  At first we considered taking it into school and showing a teacher, but as there were so many ways in which this could backfire, we quickly rejected it.

  ‘What about showing the whole class?’ I asked, as we sat with our dinners on our laps that night, watching Ace of Wands on television.

  ‘Showing the whole class what?’ said Mum, as she entered the living room with a bottle of ketchup.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said guiltily, but Mum didn’t hear as Abigail talked over me. ‘The sea urchin,’ she said loudly, covering my voice entirely.

  ‘Oh that,’ said Mum, and walked out again. A while back, my sister had bought a large red sea urchin shell from a jumble shop for a halfpenny. It had been furred with grey dust when Abigail had picked it up, but after careful scrubbing had come up bright red, and my sister was proud of it. She kept it in her room, on her dresser, next to the three whelk shells she’d picked up off the beach in Dorset and the ram’s horn from a field in Cornwall. I had a similar cache of semi-legal natural treasures in my own room, including the entire sloughed skin of an adder, itself a kind of ghostly after-image of the entire animal.

  ‘I said, what about showing the whole class?’

  ‘We’re not talking about this now,’ said Abigail, without turning her gaze away from the television. She was sometimes capable of an incredibly adult tone of voice and turn of phrase; it always stopped me dead. We didn’t discuss the photo again until we were in the attic.

  ‘I could show it to Malcolm Carpenter?’ I said.

  My sister made a face. Malcolm Carpenter was a gigantic, placid boy in our year, too large to do anything but stand out, too enormous to be bullied, and too benignly stupid to do much of anything else except eat, which he seemed to do constantly. I judged him to be particularly credulous: I had once seen Michael Shayler convince him that his dad was Evel Knievel, despite there being no way on earth that Malcolm Carpenter couldn’t know that Michael Shayler’s dad worked in the carpet shop on the high street. I had watched in wonder as Malcolm Carpenter rearranged his universe to accommodate this new information, to make this contradictory and ludicrous lie make sense.

  ‘Malcolm Carpenter,’ muttered my sister contemptuously. ‘An endorsement from Malcolm Carpenter carries no weight.’ She was talking like an adult again, which meant she was thinking.

  ‘How about Chris Bennett?’ I said. Chris Bennett was the only black kid in our school, the eldest son of the only black family in our town. As such, he probably had more than enough to deal with. My sister waved her hand dismissively at me, and I fell silent. She was gazing at the empty wall, where our ghost had once been.

  ‘Janice Tupp,’ she said at last. ‘Of course.’

  Of course. Janice Tupp. She was perfect. Forever on the periphery, a melodramatic and sickly-looking girl whose hair was always in two long pigtails. She had a nervous, hunted look to her, as if she expected the universe to be consistently unkind to her, which, to be fair, it consistently was. The only other impression I had of her was her nasal laugh, which would make itself jarringly conspicuous during assemblies. She was perfect.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  2

 
All the next morning at school, Abigail pretended to be secretly troubled, nursing some terrible agony, playing up this private crisis as much as she could in the vicinity of Janice Tupp. Finally, at lunchtime, she took Janice to one side in the playground, and they sat with their backs to the tall brick wall with the wonky cricket stumps painted on it as Abigail told of the Secret Horror of Our Attic. I watched from across the playground, full of admiration for my sister.

  We had agreed beforehand to keep the story as simple as we could, but resisting the chance to embellish on our ghost’s story had proved impossible. As it stood, the story was this: Abigail had been having a strange recurring dream for some weeks now. In the dream, she would be asleep in her bed when she became aware of strange noises in the attic above her bedroom. It was always the same sequence: a scrape, followed by a thud, repeating over and over again, scrape, thud, scrape, thud, scrape, thud. This would stop with a final, definite thud, and then a horrible silence would descend, which, if anything, was worse than the scrapes and the thuds.

  Then would come a truly horrible sound, a wet scream that gargled away to nothingness, and then only a terrible squeaking, ticking sound, as of a tense, taut rope swinging, with a heavy deadweight at the end of it.

  Our faith in the deductive powers of Janice Tupp were not great, however, so in the dream, we had Abigail get out of bed, go up the ladder and see a young, beautiful woman, in a wedding dress, swinging from a noose, beneath her the heavy wooden chest she’d dragged across the attic floor for the purpose.

  The wedding dress was my idea.

  We were right to spell it out, as it was only at the end that the story really came together for Janice Tupp, and her hand went involuntarily to her mouth. The implication was clear, Abigail told Janice, in case it wasn’t. On her wedding day, a young bride, who had lived in our house, discovered that her husband-to-be was cheating on her – with her sister, we decided, though we’d only address that if it came up – and as the bridal carriage waited outside, she went up to the attic to do the only thing that now made sense to her. And there she is still, doomed to repeat the last few minutes of her life for ever. I wanted to add the creepy detail that Abigail and I had both been having the exact same dream, but Abigail said that just made things overly complicated, and so left it out.