The Chapel

by S. T. Boston

  With Moot Hall out of the picture and keen to check the place out for himself, he took a small team of paying customers along. It was his side-line, his little banker for the future. His official business was called Scotty's Haunts, an organised paranormal event company that ran independently of his work on Unexplained UK. Sure, when he’d had that first meeting with Mike on that sunny Southampton summer’s day, organised events were not on the agenda, but then neither was ending up as a reality TV star. Times changed, and you had to roll with the punches. Scotty’s Haunts offered people, many of whom were fans of the fledgling show, the chance to spend some quality time in some of the UK’s most notoriously haunted places. The fact he’d set the small event company up off the back of his TV work saw him instantly able to fill places, in fact, he always had more willing participants than he had tickets. So far, the three events he'd run had been a sell-out, with every standby place filled, too. There were a whole host of people wanting to experience a slice of what they saw on their screens, with the bonus of doing it with one of the show’s stars. On one occasion Tara decided to join him, which had proved popular with the guests. One balding middle-aged guy in particular who’d spent every break flirting with her outrageously, despite the rather obvious wedding ring on his finger. Other than that, Scotty ran each event with just himself and his eighteen-year-old brother, Morgan, who was always keen to earn a few quid and escape the monotony of Island life.

  Now with the small section of audio cleaned he dropped it back into the main thread of speech, so it had some context with the conversation the team was having at the time. Moot Hall was split into four main rooms over two floors; on the ground floor you had a small area that now acted as a museum, the entrance hall and a small side room called A Bunyan Room, so named after the writer Robert Bunyan, famed for penning The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. The room paid homage to the writer who’d heralded from the town. The oddly named room was supposed to represent a section of his house as it would have looked back in the day. On the upper floor was a larger room that spanned much of the building’s footprint. Again, it contained a variety of historical artefacts that the paying public could snap with their digital cameras on day visits.

  The clip in question had come from the last vigil of the night held in the small and rather cramped A Bunyan Room.

  Scotty pushed his headphones against his ears once again and pushed play.

  “This is vigil six of the night and vigil two in A Bunyan Room,” he heard himself say from the depths of the audio file. “The time is three fifteen am on July tenth, twenty-eighteen. It’s funny, it’s not even called The Bunyan Room, it’s called A Bunyan Room.”

  “Yeah, and did you see the local walks are sponsored by Scholl foot products? Do you think that was intentional?” said the voice of his brother. There was the sound of light laughter from the few guests.

  “I heeaarrr yoouu!” came the voice from beyond the grave.

  “We have an ambient temperature in here of eighteen degrees centigrade and no electromagnetic interference on either the MEL or K2 meters,” Scotty heard himself say, totally unaware that someone from behind death's dark vale had just spoken in direct response to the joke that Morgan had made.

  “Unbelievable,” Scotty muttered to himself as he shook his head. He had to tell someone, he felt like a kid that had just aced a test. Mike had a meeting with the channel’s head honcho, so calling him was a no go. Instead, he opted for Tara’s number from his most dialled list and much to his annoyance her phone was engaged. He closed the call, but before he had a chance to properly set the iPhone down on the desk it began to ring. It was Mike.

  Chapter 10

  By the time Mike ended his call to Tara he’d cleared Media City, the home of Switch-Back TV, and was heading toward the motorway. The merciless sun that hung in the deep blue sky had raised the outside temperature to an uncomfortably sweltering thirty-one degrees centigrade, according to the digital display on his Jeep, and he wondered if it would push any higher before the day was through. Not that he could feel it inside the cab of his Jeep, the aircon was cranked high and Mike was thankful for it. He’d passed a few unfortunate motorists in older vehicles with their windows fruitlessly cranked down, managing to do no more than pipe more hot air into their cars.

  The BBC Radio 2 Travel and Weather News was reporting it a good five degrees hotter on the south coast. The travel report looked favourable for a clear run on his two-hundred-mile journey. There were reports of a few heat-related issues in the capital where the temperature was tipping the mercury at close to forty, closing a few of the arterial routes due to the melting tarmac. A typical sign of a country incapable of dealing with a little adverse weather. If it was too windy and wet the trains couldn’t run due to leaves on the line, a little snow and the roads ground to a halt, and a bit too much of the sun and they melted. Britain, you had to love it!

  The travel news ended without any reports of issues on the route he was taking. Feeling like a little music, as opposed to the rather heavy topic of infant cot death being discussed on the upcoming Jeremy Vine Show, he flipped to the digital channel Absolute 80s. Depeche Mode were singing about being unable to get enough and Mike soon found himself tapping his hands on the wheel to the classic beat. Absolute 80’s always satisfied his penchant for retro music and he decided it could keep him nicely in nostalgic company all the way to Wiltshire.

  The flare of anger that he’d almost been consumed by, but just about managed to keep a lid on during the meeting with Rick, was all but gone. Now he just felt a niggling annoyance, an annoyance that they would have the gall to make him risk his reputation. Mike knew that if he’d gone with their plans to spice things up a bit by using a little fakery even his reputation as a PI would be called into question. He always knew that it was likely that at some point in the future he’d to have to go back to working private investigation cases, now sooner than he’d originally thought. If his credibility was ever called into question over his work on the show that would no doubt seep over into his other line of work. Once a fraud, always a fraud as they say.

  A few minutes after he’d closed the line on his call to Tara, he was cruising down a reasonably quiet Park Way heading toward the M60 which would take him steadily south-east. The early afternoon traffic was light, and it was still a good few hours before the daily rush would begin. By then he would be well into Wiltshire, even with a stop for a mid-afternoon snack on the way, as long as his bladder didn't betray him. He'd not even been given the common courtesy of a brew by Rick, so he was pretty free of diuretic laced liquids. From there the journey involved a little motorway hopping until he could pick up the M6 South at Tadley Hill. Instead of staying on the M6, and likely opting for the toll to avoid circumnavigating Birmingham, he’d have to cut close to the city to get to the M5. It was then one long run down as far as Gloucester then A roads all the way to Pewsey, where the Reed residence was situated. It was a long route, especially considering that he'd have to tackle the Pewsey to Arundel trip after the meeting unless he felt too tired, then he could maybe look at bedding down in a Travel Lodge near Salisbury for the night, then finish the drive home in the morning. Something he’d been too tight to do prior to the meeting with Rick, but now was looking like the preferable option, it just depended on how long the meeting in Pewsey was going to take. He didn't mind being on the road, in fact, he quite liked it, especially when he was on his own. It gave him time to think, to get things straight, and right now there was a lot to think about. Where he took the team from here? And what the future held for them? Questions that he didn’t think he could come up with the answers to in the time it would take to do the drive, but ones he would ponder over, nonetheless. There were certain thoughts that he didn’t want, ones that came stalking through his head like some unwelcome mental trespasser, but he couldn’t stop them, they would come unprovoked, always whilst he was trying to resolve another issue. When the thoughts came, he always asked himself the same what ifs.
What if Claire hadn’t stopped at the shop? What if he’d not been too tired the night before to take her food shopping? What if the life-wrecking, drink driving son of a bitch had just stopped for a piss in the toilet before staggering to his death machine, thus stalling him for that vital extra minute, a minute that would have seen them clear of the shop? The kind of questions that could drive a man mad if he let them. He’d not let them, but there were times when he’d felt close to madness. Those times, when he had been close, they’d spun round and round for hours, like a pair of sports shoes in a washing machine on a never-ending cycle banging and bumping him toward insanity. He knew as they tumbled in his head that trying to answer those what-ifs was as futile as Macbeth trying to wash the blood, both real and metaphorical, of King Duncan from his hands.

  Following the intriguing call with Sue Reed, he’d resisted the temptation to stall in the car park of Media City and start doing research on the location. He knew Tara would be on the case and armed with the information by the time she met him and there was no point doubling up the work, not when he had half a country to cross. When it came to digging up the past on a location, her ability to root out the facts was second to none. She had a good mind for research and investigation. A mind that had been truly wasted scanning food at the local Tesco in Blandford, a mind that had never been free to blossom to its full potential. Mike had soon come to realise that in a different life, with a few different career choices, she’d have made an excellent detective. He cringed inwardly at the thought of her having to go back to her checkout job, just another hopeful sacrificed and thrown aside by the evil world of reality TV. But unlike many of the talentless wasters that graced many of the more cringe-worthy shows, Tara was talented, and she didn’t deserve this, none of them did. If the rest of his working life was destined to be PI work then maybe it was high time he got a partner, he had no doubt that she had the nuance for the job and he could even help to put her through her PI Diploma, a necessity she'd have to endure to get a licence. As for Scotty, well he was younger and had a technician career that he could fall back on, not ideal but it was something.

  As his mind switched back to Tara for a few moments and how it might be to work cases with her, he inwardly smiled. They had a certain chemistry that had sparked the day he’d met her in Bournemouth after he’d invited her for a chat following her reply to his advert, just one week before he’d met with Scotty. Tara had been picked from the many hopefuls he’d had for two reasons; she was relatively local, where most interested parties had seemed to ignore his request for people from southern counties. Secondly, she was a woman. There was no underhand reason he’d favoured having a female investigator on the team, as opposed to three males, he just felt it helped balance things out.

  It had been crystal clear that she was right for the team within minutes of first meeting her and Mike had taken an instant shine to her, enamoured by both her looks and her outgoing personality. Her smile was electric and sparkled in her eyes that seemed to be both blue and green, depending on how the light caught them. Even her mannerisms and the way she carried herself endeared him. It was the first and only time since the death of Claire he’d felt a real physical wanting and attraction toward another woman, and it was strong, too. After she’d left their informal chat, he’d found his mind wandering to her regularly. When those thoughts were in his head the what ifs always seemed to elbow their way in, as if in punishment for his feelings. It was fair to say that Mike did, and still felt guilty for the way she made him feel, for the way some nights he would lay awake and wonder how it would be to have her beside him in the bed that seemed so cold, around the house that seemed so empty. What made it harder, was the fact the attraction blatantly ran both ways. They’d just clicked, the way two people who have never met before but get thrown together in random obscurity sometimes do. Some people call it fate, but Mike didn’t believe in fate. No, to believe in such things as fate meant his wife and daughter were always destined to meet their end on the way back from the park that day, having just innocently stopped at the shop to buy a few extras for dinner. No, fate could go and fuck itself. Things just happened; life was just an out of control driverless train heading down the tracks until it was time for your stop. Nothing more.

  Despite working together for the last few years they’d never acted on their chemistry. Not during her last violent relationship where she’d turn up to some investigations wearing clothing that blatantly covered bruises caused by her dick of a boyfriend. Thankfully those days were before the show, times when the darkness of the location backed up the long sleeve tops, or turtlenecks she seemed to sport on a weekly basis. With guilt, he'd wanted to comfort her and take her away from that violent life, show her that it wasn't the norm for men to raise their fists and strike out, but he hadn't. The guilt was always there, a voice inside his head that told him to act on his feelings for Tara would be paramount to cheating, and no matter how hard he tried to shut it out he couldn’t. It nagged at him like some annoying back-seat driver. Tara had never admitted what Jason had done, not until the very end of the relationship. The stairs or a door always got the blame, it was a cliché, a terrible one, but Mike knew. He’d worked enough domestic violence cases in his time on the force to know the signs, and Tara knew that he knew, it was just never spoken of. The elephant in the room.

  Not even after the incident where she’d been beaten to shit by the loser and left on the floor of his flat had he taken her in his arms like he’d wanted to, and like he knew she’d wanted him to. He’d done no more than comfort her as a friend. That particularly nasty assault that had seen her spill her heart out to him about the abuse, but only in the manner that one friend might confide in another. It had also seen Jason the arsehole, as Mike liked to inwardly think of him, finally jailed for his handiwork and Tara set free. Sometimes shit things had to happen for something positive to bloom, and that was one of them. He’d never have wished it upon her, ever, but the changes in her confidence since his incarceration had been miraculous.

  Mike just wished he could be a bigger part of that positive change, but that guilt had stopped him acting, what other reason was there? Despite Claire’s death in twenty-eleven he still wore his wedding ring, he just had an inability to let go, and wasn’t it that inability that had set him on the path to the place he was now? Searching for the answer to that unanswerable question. Mike guessed it was that, and maybe too much time had passed now since that first meeting for anything to blossom. They both deserved it, sure, they’d both been through a world of shit to get to the point in life they now found themselves at, but it was a sad case of another time and another place, maybe then things would have been different. No, now all they did was skirt around the attraction, the odd smile here, the odd behind the scenes flirt there, no more. How many times had he imagined what it would be like to just take hold of her when one of those looks were exchanged, kiss her and feel the warmth of her body against his? He didn't know, there had been many, and the guilt followed every time like a faithful dog.

  He felt relieved that she’d taken the news about the show’s future, or lack of to be exact, surprisingly well, although he hadn’t been shocked at her comment about Rick being a cocksucker. Tara had a way with words like that. For a woman as attractive as she was, there was a part of her mouth that did seem to have come from the gutter when provoked, but he even liked that about her. It was an endearing juxtaposition against her otherwise feminine appearance. A little two fingers to the otherwise PC mad world that said she didn’t give a shit; she was who she was and if you didn’t like it you could jolly well fuck off.

  Now he had to break the news to Scotty, then see if he was up for an unpaid case. He wasn’t quite sure how he was going to tackle that one. He knew Scotty had pumped a fair bit of his earnings from the show into settling a few debts and starting his own paranormal event company. Kit didn't come cheap and he'd had to start buying a second stock of his own stuff, only it wasn't a case of buying one EMF met
er or one set of audio ear amplifiers, he’d needed a few. Paying guests would expect to play with the cool, spooky toys they’d seen on their screens, so just having one was a no go. Mike knew Scotty had acquired, well - more borrowed, a few bits of the team’s TV funded kit for his recent Moot Hall investigation, unbeknownst to the production team of course. He just hoped Scotty still had it, as the majority of the equipment owned by the channel was in storage back at Media City. Whatever Scotty had managed to swift aside, they could go whistle for if they wanted it back.

  “Scott Hampton,” Mike instructed his hands-free Bluetooth system as he pulled to a stop at a red light. A fully loaded aggregate lorry was coughing black diesel fumes out directly in front of him, the smell permeated the Jeep causing him to wrinkle his nose and shut down the aircon for a second. As soon as it was turned off the heat began to rise in the cab, like a fast warming fan oven. The on-screen display thought about his request for a second before connecting the call, it only rang the once before he picked up.

  “Mike!” he heard Scotty’s excited voice answer from the far south of the country. It filled his Jeep with its enthusiasm as it piped from every speaker. “You’re not going to believe this, the channel are going to shit pine cones for not letting us do Moot.”

  Scotty’s excited outpouring took him off guard. He swallowed, despite his mouth feeling dry and said, “What have you got?” then mentally kicked himself for not being more assertive and getting to the real point of his call. The light turned green and the lorry spewed a cloud of black smoke as it laboured to movement. As soon as it cleared, he fired the aircon up, enjoying its coolness as it hit his fast moistening brow.

  “An EVP from the organised event I ran last week, and a real fucking peach of one, too. Are you in the car on speaker?”