The Chapel

by S. T. Boston

  “What’s up, Hen?” Ellie asked softly in a half whisper and feeling a little spooked herself. Slowly, that rotten feeling crept back into her stomach, the one she’d felt when they’d arrived, but she’d either gotten used to it, like you sometimes did a bad smell, or managed to forget about it. Momentarily he didn’t seem to register that she’d put the light on, nor did he seem to be aware of her presence in the room. It was as if his brain had been caught somewhere between the worlds of waking and sleeping, like those who experience night terrors, or as the phenomenon was called in the days before they understood what caused it on a more scientific level, Old Hag.

  “Ellie,” he said suddenly snapping out of it. Then, like the flicking of a switch he threw back the covers and bolted across the carpet, wrapping himself around Ellie’s waist so tightly it made her wince in pain. His skin felt icy cold and through the pain of his grip, she shivered again. “D-did you s-see h-him Ells?” Henry sobbed in his small voice, looking up at her with wide frightened eyes that pooled with tears.

  “See who?” Ellie ruffled his hair reassuringly, then unfolded him from her waist and dropped to his level.

  “H -he was in the corner, o-over there,” Henry said, his shaky voice no more than a whisper. “He went when you t-turned on the light, but I could see him, he was darker than the dark.”

  Ellie felt her hackles rise, every part of the sensible side of her brain told her that her little brother had been caught in one of those night terrors, where seemingly awake the things of nightmares still stalked you, making the dream all the more terrifying. Ellie had studied night terrors as part of her psychology course, she was far from an aficionado on the matter, but she knew enough, and she also knew that they were not a condition that usually afflicted him. However, the other half of her brain recalled how real that night visit from her deceased grandmother had felt, the smell of her perfume and the chill on her cheek, a chill so similar to the cold that had choked Henry’s room, a cold that had suddenly disappeared. Henry’s room was now inexplicably as comfortably warm as her own and somehow the temperature had risen faster than seemed naturally possible.

  “I think you had a nightmare, Hen,” she reassured with a lie. It came off her lips easily, as little white lies did when they were for the benefit of a small child. Ellie kissed the top of his head to secure her point, his blonde hair felt wet with sweat as did the back of his Spiderman PJs.

  “I wasn’t d-dreaming,” he half whispered, and half whined. “I woke up f-for a weewee and he w-was there,” Henry pointed to the corner of the room where a large white built-in wardrobe spanned the width of the room. “He was watching me.”

  “Where did he go?” Ellie asked, then immediately regretted embracing his story.

  Henry shrugged his little shoulders, they shook a little as he sobbed, “I t-think he w-went into t-the wardrobe w-when you t-turnded the l-light on.”

  “Turned,” she corrected. “Turned the light on.”

  “Turned the light on,” he said, keen to get it right.

  “Like Mike and Sully?” One of Henry’s favourite movies was Monsters Inc and she guessed that putting a light spin on whatever he’d seen or dreamt would comfort him a little.

  “No, Mike and S-sully aren’t s-scary.”

  “What’s say we open that wardrobe up and you’ll see nothing is there?”

  “Nooo.” Henry winged as Ellie stood and took his hand. He pulled back reluctantly as she walked toward the white door.

  “I promise you, Little Man, that no one will be in there,” Ellie reached the door. As she did, she felt a shiver run down her back, she would never have admitted or shown it to her younger brother, but she was scared, about as scared as she could ever remember being. Inwardly she cursed herself for watching one too many paranormal shows. One? No more like three or four too many horror films. If this was a horror she thought, as she stalled at the cupboard door, this would be the part where the audience hides behind its hands, and teenage girls bury their faces into their date’s shoulder with the guy taking full advantage to slip a reassuring arm around them, an arm that won’t get moved when the scare had been spent.

  Ellie gripped the handle, the sound of her heart thundering in her ears. Just as she went to pull it open a loud thump echoed up from the ground floor. Ellie released her grip of the door handle as if it had bitten her, Henry bolted into the room he’d been so keen to escape not ten seconds before and wrapped himself around her waist again, burying his face into the hemline of her PJ shorts. And there is the scare, Ellie thought, trying to kid herself. For a few drawn-out seconds neither of them spoke; they just stood totally still and in silence.

  “It’s okay,” Ellie finally reassured when nothing but deep silence had followed the loud thump. “Just pipes or the building creaking, it’s an old house, Hen, they make odd noises," Ellie remembered how Mike Cross and the Unexplained UK team debunked nightly bangs, bumps and creaks in an old Victorian style council house, finding the answer in both the old plumbing and wooden roof beams.

  “I-it’s n-n-not,” Henry whimpered. “It’s h-him – The Man!”

  “I’ve told you before, Hen, The Man is just someone that mum and dad made up to make you behave.”

  When Henry had been around two, and of the age where he started testing the patience of their parents, The Man had been invented. A despicable character of no particular description, apart from his penchant for taking away naughty children. Won’t go to bed? The Man will come. Won’t eat your dinner? The Man will come. Won’t listen to mum and dad? You can bet your shit The Man would come for that little faux pas, too!

  “He’s not,” Henry protested. “He w-was here.” Henry looked at her expectantly, his wide blue eyes shimmering with tears. “I’d n-not e-even been b-bad,” he stammered, beginning to sob harder again.

  “Listen, no one was in your room, Henry,” Ellie kept her voice low and soothing whilst trying to sound sure and assertive, hoping he would take some comfort from her reasoning. More lies, as by now Ellie was pretty certain something had happened. One too many paranormal shows, three or four too many horror flicks, she thought to herself again. “It’s an old building, it’s new surroundings and you simply woke up from a bad dream. I promise. Now let’s open this door and I’ll bet you an ice cream that no one is in there, what do you say?” Ellie felt like some misleading government official telling members of the public that the UFO they’d just seen was nothing more than Venus reflexing off atmospheric gases released by some local swamp.

  Henry didn’t speak, he just chewed his bottom lip slowly, and reluctantly nodded his head in agreement.

  More freaked out and scared than she felt proud of Ellie placed her hand back on the brass handle, the metal felt ice cold beneath her skin. Drawing a slow breath, she yanked open the door, fast, a little like removing a plaster. The built-in wardrobe was empty, save for a few wire coat hangers that jingle-jangled lightly to themselves in the disturbed air.

  “See, empty!” Ellie tried to hide the relief in her voice.

  “Can I sleep in with you, Ells, plllleeaseeee…” her brother whined in his best, I’ll get what I want eventually voice. If she insisted he stay in his room then no sooner had she climbed back into bed and gotten comfortable then he’d be calling for her again. On a side note Ellie was certain that there was no way she’d stay in his room herself so expecting a child of five to just wasn’t on, not that she was going to admit that to him. As for the loud thump from downstairs, yes this was an old building, and old buildings make odd noises, but old buildings also had history and sometimes that history stuck around. Whatever had caused it was likely something quite natural, amplified by the sheer fact she was a little freaked out. Ellie would never openly admit to it but a big part of her was glad of the company, even if Henry was only five.

  “Sure, is there anything you want to bring?” she conceded.

  “Just my Muddy Puddles George,” he answered, already sounding better.

  Ell
ie led him to his bed and dug around under the disturbed covers. His sheets were damp from perspiration, another good sign that what he’d experienced was no more than a dream. Finally, she located George’s hiding place and she handed the stuffed toy pig to her little brother who hugged him tightly into his little chest with his spare arm.

  Back in her room Henry soon made himself comfortable snuggled into her, Muddy Puddles George was also there, although he didn’t take up quite as much room.

  “Hen?” Ellie whispered, not sure if he’d fallen straight to sleep or not.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why was it so cold in your room? Did you have your window open?” Ellie knew it was a nonsense question to ask a five-year-old and the night air in late July wouldn’t have been as frigid, but part of her wanted some kind of answer so she could take a portion of solace from the situation.

  She felt her little brother shake his head, “No, it got all cold when I saw The Man.”

  It wasn’t the answer she was hoping for, but before Ellie had the chance to question him any further, she heard his breathing become heavy and she knew he’d fallen asleep with the speed that only a young child or a suffering narcoleptic could muster. Ellie, however, wasn’t feeling tired. Reaching under her pillow she found her S8 and checked the time. It was three AM.

  Ellie lay there, with Henry curled up in a tight ball next to her, her eyes fixed on the darken oak beams above as she listened intently to the sounds of The Old Chapel. Time ticked by slowly. Ellie thought she’d not sleep again that night, that she would still be gazing at the ceiling when the first shafts of morning light found their way under the heavy drapes. But around four sleep did find her, not a deep sleep, more a semi-lucid doze, a semi-consciousness where it was hard to separate dreams from reality. Caught in that strange limbo she thought she heard Henry crying again, but it couldn’t have been, he was with her, and this sounded like a much younger child far off in another part of the building. Unseen by her closed eyes, the shadows above her stirred at the sound of the cries. They parted and squirmed excitedly, like a nest of silent serpents, before coming together to form one large black mass that slid and slipped silently over the oak beams. The cries came and went, ebbing and flowing the way a distant radio is sometimes caught on the breeze at the beach on a hot day. Eventually, she felt sure the sound was no more than the wind outside, or a distant fox howling somewhere in the dense forest.

  Ellie was wrong.

  Chapter 6

  “It’s not that they don’t like you,” Rick Livingstone said, his accent held a hint of Australian, a testament to his family’s Antipodean heritage. It came and went, sometimes stronger and more pronounced and at other times, barely even noticeable. His fair complexion and blonde hair, that bordered on containing a hint of ginger in certain lights, meant he was far more suited to a life in the more temperate climate of northern Europe than Down-Under. Rick collected a cup of black coffee up from his highly polished black-glass desk and examined the steaming brew for a brief second as if deciding whether it was safe to drink. Eventually he took a tentative sip and smacked his lips together in satisfaction. “It’s just – well, how can I put it, Mike? The show hardly produced any results. If the channel wanted a history program, we’d have hired Tony fuckin’ Robinson.”

  Mike Cross ran both hands up over his stubbly chin, closed his eyes and worked his fingertips over his eyelids. He hadn’t been offered a coffee but he sure as hell could have used one. The headache that was now starting to pulse behind his eyes was no doubt due to a lack of caffeine, his one and only vice. That, and the fact he’d been up since silly o’clock, after pulling a late-nighter the evening before trying to prepare for this very meeting. A meeting where he knew he and his team would be hung out to dry.

  Being too tight to pay for a hotel Mike had left his home in Arundel, on the South-East Coast, at half five in the morning just to make the eleven o’clock appointment at the UK Today and Switchback TV studio offices in Manchester’s Media City. (The very same office where a year ago he’d been sat in front of Rick, the controller of UK Today, a generic satellite channel that had sprung up just over three years ago, as so many had over the years, signing the deal that secured him his own show.) A show that now looked as if it were about to be snatched away by the very hand that had given it. Mike exhaled a long breath and said, “The work I do, or we do as a team, is not exactly a measurable quantity, and as you’ve seen we have experienced things, it’s just we were able to offer a likely and reasonable explanation for them.” Mike paused, choosing his words carefully. He had a small fiery ball of anger developing in the pit of his stomach and he was trying hard not to fan the flames. “You knew my angle on this Rick, when you offered me this chance. It came off the back of my work on the Sleaford Haunting, or do I need to remind you?”

  Rick held his left hand up, palm open, the way a police officer might signal a moving car to stop, “I know, Mike,” he said hastily. “I love the backstory that brought you to me, and the public love a good ghost story, but one thing they love more is to see someone be discredited and made to look an idiot. That case ticked every box! The Sleaford Haunting made national press thanks to the Youtube videos that went viral, and because of the way the Jennings family whored themselves out to any bastard who’d listen to their claims. And plenty did, at having the most haunted council house in the country. So, they’d seen too many horror movies, or they wanted to have a case as renowned as the Enfield Poltergeist or the Black Monk of East Drive, who the fuck knows? Who the fuck cares? But their gravy-train had to end, and it did with you. North Kesteven council hired you in as a private investigator to consider the claims of benefit fraud and undeclared earnings off the back of their little Youtube success, not to mention the fuck-knows how much they earned from selling the story to the press…”

  “Somewhere in the region of fifteen thousand pounds,” Mike cut in, recalling the case that had caught the attention of the channel. “Not to mention the cash from Youtube advert clicks, that ran into tens of thousands.”

  “Yeah, well it takes the piss really, all the while they were still sponging off the state, makes me fuckin’ sick,” Rick said, leaning back on his chair to the point where it might tip back, Mike hoped it would. “Then, off the back of the financial investigation you headed up, you brought in the team to prove the entire thing was nothing but a fraud, and WHAM! You blew the lid on the whole bastard thing. You got fired from obscurity to fame, to a certain extent anyway, and now the tide is on the turn again. It’s a dog-eat-dog business, Mike. Don’t make this harder than it is. You’re good at what you do, too good maybe.”

  “You knew when you contracted the show that I wanted to be different from that Haunted Happenings shit, if you were after that kind of thing maybe you should have tried to steal Chrissy Meadows and her husband away from Channel Five.”

  “Look, here is the issue, Mike. Yes, we want someone credible, and you fit the bill. Ten years as a copper, a Detective Sergeant by the time you threw the towel in; five, going on six years working as a PI whilst for the last three running a small team of paranormal investigators. Mixed with the personal tragedy of the loss of your wife and kid in that accident back in twenty-eleven, the very thing that got you into paranormal research. The public love that shit, they do. Serve it up on toast and they’d eat it for breakfast. But, the public who watch these shows also want to be scared."

  "I'm glad my personal trauma is entertaining," Mike growled. He could feel his temper teetering on the edge. Rick was right, though. The loss of his wife, Claire and his six-month-old daughter, Megan in a drunken hit and run seven years ago had secured his obsession with trying to answer that unanswerable question. Was there something waiting after death?

  Rick shifted uneasily in his expensive, but not that comfortable looking chair, obviously taken aback by Mike’s outburst. He steepled his fingers in front of his mouth and exhaled through them, then said, "Look, Mike, all I'm saying is that these fuckin'
shows are like a religion to some of these people. Now I know you’d have to be halfway to the local fuckin' nut house to swallow what Meadows and her team of kooks sell over on Five, I do - I get it, but that shit-house-show still has twice the viewers of Unexplained UK.” Rick rubbed his hands together and fixed Mike’s eyes with his. They suddenly seemed full of enthusiasm. “Look, we can still have a credible show, we just need to use a little, shall we say - artistic licence! And if you’re willing to work with me, Mike, then we might be able to save it.”

  Mike shook his head, he’d been reluctant in the first place to get involved with a TV company, and had felt at the time as if he were getting into bed with a nest of vipers who at some point would ask him to sell his soul like some evil, devil worshipping sect, and he’d been right, here it was. “Do you know how stupid that sounds, Rick? You want to use my credibility, credibility I’ve worked hard to earn I might add, just to put believability on a few faked paranormal events, just to get a scare, just satisfy ratings and keep you and the board members happy.”

  Rick nodded, “And is it really that bad, Mike? I mean, think about it. You’ve seen the show, right?”

  “I’ve watched two episodes; the Jamaica Inn one and the Pontefract one. I’m not really narcissistic enough to get kicks out of seeing myself on TV.” Which was true, Mike had dipped in and out of two episodes, just, if anything, to critique himself. Tara, on the other hand, one of his team of three, or Tig as they called her on the show, thanks to her full name being Tara India Gibb, had watched them all, and likely more than once over. Tara claimed the India part of her name stemmed from her country of conception, or so her hippy-like parents had told her. Mike didn’t blame her for enjoying her obscure spell of fame, they’d spent a good few years having to pay out of their own pocket to just get through the door of most places. Being on the TV investigating was where the majority of other teams wanted to be, and having your own show sparked a fair amount of jealousy. It was fair to say that she was enjoying her five minutes of paranormal fame as much as she could, which was fine, as it looked like the clock was about to tick to minute six. After every show, she made a point of calling him up to ask if he’d watched it and if she’d come across okay on camera. Mike had known her long enough to understand her need for approval didn’t come from vanity, more insecurity. At thirty-six she’d suffered two abusive relationships and she wore the mental scars of both like some singletons wear their hearts on their sleeve.