The Chapel

by S. T. Boston

  Mike flicked on his left turn indicator and slowed the vehicle to a stop, drawing level with the transit and almost blocking the road. The van contained a uniformed bobby who got out of the driver’s side clutching a clipboard. Mike lowered the electric window and felt the heat of the day rush into his chilled cab.

  "Mike Cross," he said to the officer who looked fresh-faced and no older than twenty-five. "I'm here to see DI Mark Samuels. I believe he is expecting me.”

  The officer looked him up and down through the window whilst he bit absently on his lower lip, a look of slight annoyance dressing his face at having to actually get out of the van. He glanced at the clipboard, scribbled Mike’s name onto what experience told him would be the outer scene log and said, “The DI is waiting for you, just pull down the drive,” gesturing with his hand as if directions were needed. “Give me a sec to pull the van outta the way.”

  Mike nodded in understanding and craned his neck taking in his first real look at the renovated chapel, its stone walls and large stained-glass reproduction windows just visible at the end of the long, straight, shingle drive. Mike could see a further two marked cars down there, a Crime Scene Examiners van and a dark metallic grey Vauxhall Astra, the same car he'd seen Samuels drive away from the Travel Lodge in some hours earlier.

  The officer jumped back into the cab, the engine was running to power the aircon and Mike saw a darkened patch on the shingle where the water expelled from the condenser had soaked into the ground. The van reversed slowly back out onto the road pulling directly in behind Mike’s Jeep, allowing him to lock the wheel in a tight left and swing in between the old stone gateposts.

  Samuels was stood leaning against the boot of his Astra thumbing through some papers, he spotted Mike as he approached and raised a hand lazily in greeting. Mike pulled to a stop behind the CID car and feeling a dose of trepidation, got out.

  “Good to see you again buddy,” Samuels said, placing the papers on the roof of the car and taking Mike’s hand in his and pumping it up and down a few times. “Can you believe this weather?”

  “No sign of it letting up,” Mike said in agreement. “Give it a day of rain when it finally breaks and the ones complaining about the heat will start bleating on about it being the wettest summer ever!”

  Samuels chuckled, “Yeah,” he said still smiling, “that’s about the truth of it, too.”

  “Any progress?” Mike asked, nodding toward the building.

  Samuels sighed and adjusted the collar of his light blue shirt; a line of sweat had chased its way around the top of the collar. “Nothing, zippo, zilch,” he said.

  “How was the press conference?”

  “Pretty shit, you know how it is buddy, a pack of hungry press and two distraught parents all thrown into the pit together.”

  “How are they holding up?”

  “The father is doing best, putting a brave face on it all, he has to. Carol – the mother, she is bad, I mean really bad. She didn’t say a word in that conference, just looked vacantly at those reporters and let him do the talking. I can’t imagine what they must be going through, it always amazes me how people cope.” He looked at Mike and Mike knew he was probably regretting what he’d said, Mike’s own personal loss momentarily forgotten to him.

  “Still no hunch then?” Mike asked, brushing it aside. It didn’t bother him, he didn’t want people to pussy-foot around him, having to watch what they said.

  “I wish,” Samuels replied shaking his head as he spoke. “Take a walk around the place with me while we chat?”

  For a moment Mike felt a pang of hope, but he soon realised that his old colleague meant around the outside and not in. “Sure,” he said, hiding the disappointment. “You lead the way.” His mouth felt parched, like old dried out leather and he wished dearly that he’d stopped on the way and picked up a Coke or bottle of water.

  Samuels pushed himself away from the back of the car where he’d been leant and started toward the large stone structure, he cut to the right and made his way onto the lush, green and well-cut lawn.

  “Reproduction stained glass fixed windows,” Samuel said, gesturing at one of the larger side apertures that had formed part of the original structure. “The later ones are timber oak framed double glazing, lockable from the inside.” They reached the back door, a small retaining wall split the rear lawn there into two levels. “Timber framed double glazed rear door, locked from the inside and dead bolted.” He sat on the wall and looked in earnest at Mike, squinting slightly in the sun. The looming bell tower cast a long shadow across the grass to the left of the chapel and Mike tilted his head back and looked toward the de-commissioned bell. “Same on the other side and the front door is oak, solid and about three inches thick. Locked again from the inside, dead bolted as well. Both keys were hung by the door, according to the parents.”

  Mike knew this already, but sometimes to work the problem you had to keep going over it in your head, and sometimes vocalising it helped. Mike joined his old friend on the wall and they now both sat facing the rear door and kitchen window like two old friends just casually shooting the shit on a sunny summers evening. All that was missing was a couple of beers. Mike looked through the rear window and could see what looked to be a plush kitchen with a large American style fridge freezer combo.

  “If the parents weren’t somehow involved, Mike, you tell me how the fuck those kids got out?”

  “I thought you said you didn’t suspect them?” Mike replied, the flat stone coping on which he sat felt warm on his behind and he placed his palms flat down to his side onto the smooth stone enjoying the heat of them. A small part of him felt chilled and he wondered if it was the building, or if it was in his head from what he knew.

  “I don’t. I mean that. But what other explanation is there?” Samuels rubbed his eyes and Mike could see the lines of stress on his face. The powers that be would be leaning a good deal of pressure on him to get this one resolved, either by figuring out just what had happened to the Harrison kids or by finding them alive and solving this riddle.

  "Have you noticed anything odd or off with the place?" Mike asked. He didn't have the answers to the questions that Samuels dearly wanted so he began to steer the conversation his way.

  Samuel's looked at him as if considering the question, "No," he finally said. Yet in a way that made Mike feel unsure about just how truthful he was being. Mike put the question to bed, for now. I could come out again later once they'd chatted a bit and he had a feel for things. “What is it you think you know about this place?” Samuels asked. There was no mocking in his voice, just genuine puzzlement. “I mean you turn up here out of the blue and in the midst of all this.”

  Mike took a deep breath and let it out slowly before saying, “On Friday morning, before all this shit kicked off, I took a call from Sue Reed. Her and her husband own this place, but you probably know that.” Samuels didn’t speak, he just nodded his head. “Tig – Tara,” Mike corrected, “and I went to see both Sue and Tom at their home in Wiltshire that evening.”

  Mike proceeded to tell all he knew, about the reports from previous guests and how only one stayed for the whole duration of their booking, about the suicides, and the drowning of the baby. When he’d finished, Samuels looked at the building for a few drawn out seconds, as if it would yield all its secrets to him. “That’s quite some ghost story,” he finally said with a wry chuckle.

  “Do you also know,” Mike added, “that anyone, save for the Reeds, who has owned this place has died as a result of it. The original owner, the village Minister, killed in a fire. The guy who originally tried to renovate it died doing the roof, then the estate agent who sold it to the Reeds was killed in a crash, not a mile from here after he'd visited the place post-sale?" Mike instinctively checked his phone. There was no service, but he had an email waiting from Tara that had come through on his journey before he'd really gotten out into the sticks. It had attachments that he’d not be able to open without Wifi but he knew what
they were, the two centuries of research she’d done on missing kids in the area. Mike knew she wanted him to show it to Samuels but that wasn’t going to happen just yet, not until they knew more. Samuels probably already thought that he was verging on madness; trying to sell him a theory which he didn’t even buy into himself would be ludicrous.

  “Well it sure seems to have a colourful history,” Samuels said. "But I don't see what this has to do with my missing persons case."

  “It likely doesn’t,” Mike said truthfully, “but I knew at some point you’d speak to the Reeds and I didn’t want them telling you about why I am here before I got a chance to chat to you myself.”

  "I appreciate that buddy, I did get a feeling from our chat earlier that you were interested in the case on more than a casual basis." Samuels paused, looked back at the building then said," When you say odd, what exactly do you mean? Ghosts, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night?" He chuckled softly.

  “Yeah,” Mike said reproachfully. He still felt a little embarrassed at times about broaching the subject with people, especially ones such as Samuels who were engaged in a professional investigation. “I’m guessing from how you asked, and the way you answered my question originally that’s a yes?”

  “Maybe,” Samuels replied, not returning his attention to Mike. “I’d not normally mention it and I didn’t plan on adding kindling to your fire but seeing as you asked and are being upfront with me, I’ll be the same. Since we started the investigation here there are two things that have struck me as strange.”

  “Go on,” Mike encouraged, naturally leaning closer.

  “Firstly, on the day the call came in we had a police dog out here to help search the woods, the damn mutt wouldn’t come out of the van. Actually pissed itself right there in the cage and bit the handler. It just stayed there in the van cowering in the back. I’ve never seen anything like it, Mike. We got another dog out here later that day and the exact same thing happened.”

  “That is odd,” Mike said. He knew police dogs; had known his share of handlers and those pooches usually sprang out of the rear holding cage like a jack-in-the-box as soon as it opened. “They do say animals have a higher sense of things. There was obviously something here neither dog liked.”

  “I put it down to the heat,” Samuels said dismissively.

  “What else>” Mike asked. Every nugget of information from what the Reeds had told him, to the petrified police dogs convinced him further that this idyllic looking holiday let had a dark and hidden history, one he was keen to dive into and expose. He wasn’t totally sure he was ready to say the place was haunted. He did believe though, that if bad things happened enough in one place, or a singular horrific act occurred then it could somehow imprint itself on a place, as if into the very fabric of the building. Some referred to it as stone tape recordings and many believed they were the reason people saw ghosts, specifically the kind that weren’t classed as intelligent hauntings, the ones where the same spirit was often seen walking the halls of a mansion at night, or the old tale of a corpse being seen swinging from a bridge having taken his life after being jilted by his lover. It certainly seemed more plausible to Mike than the spirits of the dead returning from beyond the grave. When he'd been nineteen, he'd done a little travelling in Europe and had visited the infamous Auschwitz. If ever there was a place that felt off, it was there, the feeling whilst inside the fences and halls of that terrible camp of death was almost palpable. Mike wasn't getting any particular bad vibes from The Old Chapel, but then he’d not been inside, yet.

  “Last night,” Samuels began with some reluctance, “The PC on night turn cordon duty, a lady named Shelly Ardell, fell down the stairs inside. She’s fractured her skull and broken her neck.”

  “Fuck,” Mike exclaimed. “What was she doing in there?”

  “That, my friend, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Samuels replied with a non-meaningful chuckle. “She had no reason to be in there, not unless she thought someone was inside.”

  “You’ve not managed to ask her yet?”

  “Still unconscious,” Samuels answered. “It could be that she won’t ever wake-up. She has a husband and a three-year-old kid,” He looked down at his shoes, then back to the building. “The guy on point at the gate last night, Luke, found her body this morning when he walked down to take a piss in the portaloo and saw she was missing from her car."

  “Tragedy after tragedy,” Mike said. PC Ardell was now just another name on his list of people who’d fallen foul of the place.

  “Coincidence,” Samuels said. “Nothing more.” He looked back to Mike and asked, “What’s your play here, Mike? There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I know that I was planning on staying away until this had all been sorted, one way or another, but Sue Reed asked me to come down, see if there was anything I could do. She thinks the building has something to do with what's happened here."

  “Impossible,” Samuels said in the same dismissive tone, like a parent discounting some tall tale told by a child. Mike knew he was losing him; the conversation was on the turn. “The best thing you can do is head home until the police investigation has finished, then you’ll be free to do your spook hunt.”

  Mike felt anger flare up inside of him, he was an investigator even if he no longer carried a warrant card. "I find rational explanations," Mike defended, his voice firm. "I'm not a sideshow. What I know is there are some pretty far out reports from this place, and disaster seems to follow it like a dog does his master. I'm not suggesting those kids got sucked through the TV like the girl in Poltergeist to the nether realm. I think there is a rational reason behind what’s happened, all I am doing is trying to come at this from a direction that I know the police won't."

  “The reason we don’t come at it from that direction, Mike, is because it’s bullshit and will just waste valuable time when we could be following up real lines of enquiry.”

  "You don't have any lines of fucking enquiry, Mark," Mike said defensively. He didn’t want to come to blows with his old colleague, but it was brewing.

  “Look, Mike,” he said his voice losing some of the irritation, “stay, go – it really doesn’t matter. Just don’t get involved or in our way, and for Christ’s sake stay out of the way of the press. The last thing I need is this becoming a circus. When we finish with the place it’s yours to do what you want with.”

  “Understood,” Mike replied, glad the brewing argument had diffused itself. He didn’t blame Samuels for the way he thought, he himself had been quick to dismiss Scotty when he’d made the leap of faith to all the random disappearances being the work of some undiscovered cult. Someone coming to him with tales of hauntings mixed with the pressures that he knew his old friend would be facing to solve this likely had him on edge stress-wise. Mike noticed a uniformed officer hurrying around the side of the building signalling frantically at Samuels who got up and strode over to him. Mike tried to listen, but they were too far away for him to hear. After what seemed like an age but was really no more than a few minutes Samuels walked slowly back, his face looking grave.

  “Development?” Mike asked, raising his eyebrows.

  "Yes, and not for the better," he paused, then ran a hand over his face. "Some tourist walking along the shore down at Charlestown has found a shoe. It's an exact match for the kind that Henry Harrison was wearing when he went missing. Apparently, it even has the poor little bugger's initials on the tongue." He looked gravely at Mike. "This is looking like it might become a murder investigation, Mike and right now the only conceivable people who could have taken those kids out of that place," he gestured at it with a thumb, "are the parents."

  “You know that doesn’t make sense,” Mike said.

  "Nothing to do with this case makes sense,” Samuel said woefully. “Maybe I read them wrong, who knows. All I know is that right now it’s the most rational line of enquiry and no matter what I think they will be coming in.”

  Mike’s thoughts t
urned directly to the reports that Tara had dug up from the sixties and before, all those missing girls who had seemingly drowned with no real explanation or body ever being found. Also, the reports that had come before, the ones where the full details of what had happened were lost in the bowls of time. ‘This is it, Mike, I can feel it,’ She’d said, and he’d dismissed her, now the possibility didn’t seem quite so improbable.

  Chapter 27

  For a few seconds when I wake, I forget, I forget about the cancer, the death sentence, and everything is alright. For a few precious seconds it's all okay. And then I remember. I try to go back to sleep, just to have those few seconds again, but I can't, not until the next morning, a morning closer to the day it will actually beat me and win.

  Ellie remembered those words clearly, the words of her gran, spoken to her mother from the hospice bed where she’d spent the last few weeks of life, gradually being eaten away by the cancer that had riddled its way through her body. That once vibrant and full of life woman had just withered away until she was no more than skin clinging to bone beneath sterile white sheets. Ellie didn’t have cancer, she’d never suffered more than a fractured ankle bone, but now she understood what her gran had meant. For now, she awoke again, and yes – for a few seconds everything was alright, everything was okay. She did forget. And then she remembered. She remembered the blackness of the room, the thin mattress on the cold and unforgiving floor and how it bit into her hip when she lay on her side. She remembered the smell of the damp stone, she remembered how she had no idea how long she’d been there, she remembered that she had no idea if it were night or day.