Barb clattered down the echoing stairwell of the building that housed her department's offices, her laptop bag banging awkwardly into her hip with every step. She had stuck a notice to the corkboard outside her office saying that she was ill, which was not entirely true, but seemed the most plausible explanation for suddenly vanishing halfway through the day.
At the bottom of the stairs, a set of double doors led directly to a short flight of outer steps, and thence to the pavement. She slammed through the doors at full speed, and then stopped at the head of the steps for a moment, thrown off by the transition from the stuffy interior, with its smells of wet boots and floor wax and old books, to the crisp, drizzly outdoor air. The shock of it cleared her head a bit, and she took a few deep, steadying breaths. It was going to be all right, really it was. She was not going to run off half-cocked; she was going to drive home calmly, with deliberation and forethought, and see for herself that there was nothing that could have made that noise down the phone line. And then when she next spoke to Alison, she would set it forth as an example of how easily a simple coincidence could seem like something supernatural.
All right, Barbara Anne. It wasn't Robert's voice she imagined this time, but Paul's: deep and masculine, but still youthful, just as it had been the last time they spoke. You're the clever one in the family. Let's hear your explanation for what else it could have been.
Anything, she thought back. Interference, a loose connector, cosmic radiation hitting a mobile phone mast somewhere - who knows?
She stopped, feeling stupidly satisfied, as if she'd proven a point. Cars zipped past on the wet road. A young couple strolled toward her, hands entwined, rucksacks slung over their shoulders. Then:
Or a ghost, said the Paul-voice.
"Oh, stop it," Barb groaned aloud. The boy and girl broke off their conversation and glanced at her, and she looked away swiftly. This was ridiculous. She could stand here on the steps all day, having make-believe arguments with her dead brother, or she could just go home and put an end to all debate. Perhaps if she were very lucky, she'd bump into Alison there and kill two birds with one stone.
No! Don't go alone. It isn't safe. Get Alison first.
The voice had a distinctly alarmed ring to it this time, and Barb flinched; it was beginning to sound a bit too separate from her own personality for comfort. She had talked to herself off and on all her life - there was nothing abnormal about that, highly intelligent people were known for it, and Barb had no false modesty about her intellectual gifts. It was when the imaginary voices started speaking on their own that the trouble began.
Bugger that for a game of soldiers, she thought, and shouldering her laptop bag, started walking.
Her resolute mood carried her all the way to the car park, into her car, and out into the flow of midday traffic. She made it round the first corner, and then suddenly felt weak and giddy and horrible all over, and had to pull over abruptly and sit very still, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Every time she thought she was getting better, another wave hit and made her clutch the wheel for support. She leant her head against the slick, rain-cooled glass of the window and shut her eyes, listening to drops pattering on the windscreen and praying to whatever powers there were that she wasn't going to be sick again. One bout of that in twenty-four hours was more than enough.
As the worst of the nausea slowly ebbed, she realised that last night's sickness might actually be the source of her trouble. She'd lost most of what she'd eaten yesterday, and the only thing she'd had since then was half a slice of cake; her blood sugar had probably fallen off the bottom of the chart by now. She'd scolded Robert a hundred times for getting stuck into work so deeply that he forgot to eat, and now here she was doing the same thing.
Cautiously, she opened her eyes and peered through the wet window. There was a deli not far from here where she and he had gone for lunch on occasion; perhaps she ought to stop there and get something before she went home, to fortify herself for whatever she might find when she arrived. She thought she'd walk, though. She didn't trust herself to drive any further in this state.
---
"And you don't think it's the brother?"
"No, I don't."
Alison wrapped the telephone cord tightly round her wrist, making it lie flat and smooth, then unwound it again and inspected the marks it had left on her skin. "It's something awful, Helen. I've spoken to angry spirits before, but this thing - it's wicked."
There was a pause on the other end of the line, during which Alison could hear the raucous sounds of a game show in the background. Helen was one of her Aunty Vi's old friends, still sticking in there at eighty-seven, and she was so plagued by the voices of spirits that she turned the television right up to drown them out. Alison sympathised -- she'd done the same thing often enough herself -- but it made having a conversation difficult, particularly as Helen was also beginning to go rather deaf.
"Helen? Are you there?"
"Sorry, darling, I was thinking," Helen said, but Alison suspected she'd nodded off for a moment. "Have you been to the graveyard yet?"
"Not yet. I've got to get Barbara to drive me there; I can't take a cab that far, and trains and I don't mix any longer."
"Go soon," Helen advised. "Have a look at that grave and see if you can find out who's buried in it. You do know what day yesterday was, don't you?"
Alison's gaze drifted to her battered old chest of drawers, where yesterday's cold votives still stood in their pools of hardened white wax. "'Course I do. I lit candles."
"Good, good," said Helen, and then went quiet again. The game show ended, and Alison waited through an advert for toothpaste and then one for Doritos.
"Helen ..."
"Don't 'Helen' me," said the old lady tartly, as if she knew she'd been caught out. Then her voice softened. "Look after yourself, darling. And look after your friend too. If this spirit's set its sights on her, she could be in real danger, and not believing will only make her more vulnerable. She'll take risks."
Alison thought of saying that Barbara wasn't her friend, but it didn't seem worth the trouble of keeping Helen awake long enough to explain the real relationship between them. Instead, she promised to be careful, feeling like the eleven-year-old she'd been when she and Helen first met, and put the phone down in its cradle before letting her head drop back against the ancient flocked wallpaper.
She really didn't want to do this: didn't want to deal with Barbara's alternating terror and denial, didn't want to go to graveyards and poke through old burial records, didn't want to confront that grim presence in Barbara's house, didn't even want to go and feed the cat. She wanted to sit right here on her bedroom floor and drink wine all afternoon and pretend there were no such things as spirits. Even half a bottle would help - she could sip slowly, make it last -
No. She couldn't go there. What was more, she wouldn't. She'd never been an alcoholic like the sort that had come bleeding and vomiting and fighting into the A&E departments she'd worked in, but she'd known even before Robert had come along that her drinking had crossed the line from heavy to compulsive. Since he'd been gone, she'd been making a real effort to rein it in, restricting herself to a single glass of wine with dinner, or one shot of something harder afterward. He hadn't saved her life for her to chuck it away like an empty chocolate-bar wrapper; she owed it to him to do something with herself, even if she wasn't certain anymore what that something ought to be.
"Don't be ordinary," she said softly, and let out a small, weary laugh. "As if I ever was."
Well, she thought, if Robert had left her with no instructions on how to carry out his last wish for her, he had at least taught her that you might as well face up to things instead of hiding from them. And so with only a wistful thought for the unopened bottle in the fridge downstairs, she reached for the phone again and rang for yet another cab.
---
As Alison was preparing to set off on her errand, Barb was walking very slowly back to her car, a hard-won sandwich clutched in one hand. The deli had been full of people with wet hair and rain on their coats, chattering about what they were going to have and how much time they had to have it in, and the babble of their voices and the feverish press of their bodies had made her sick and dizzy all over again. As she'd stood there getting jostled and trying to focus her thoughts long enough to choose from fifteen different sorts of sandwich fillings, she'd suddenly realised that she felt like a visitor from another planet. She wondered whether that was how Alison felt every day.
Still pondering that idea, she slid behind the wheel of the car, then carefully locked all four doors as if that could keep out anything malevolent - silly, perhaps, but she would take any scrap of security she could get. The first bite of food nearly made her gag, but then all at once her appetite came back to life and she devoured the rest of the sandwich almost without stopping to breathe, closing her eyes in relief as strength and energy flooded back into her body. With a mouthful of egg and mayo, she reached out to switch on the radio, expecting the usual muted stream of news and sport, and instead got a deafening blast of music that ripped through her head and made her still-tender eardrum vibrate at an almost unbearable pitch.
"I AM AN ANTICHRIST
AND I AM AN ANARCHIST --"
Bits of sandwich crust went flying as she scrabbled at the controls to turn the sound down, then slumped back against the seat, heart racing. How in the hell had that happened? She hadn't changed the station - she never did - if she wanted to hear music she switched over to the MP3 player - and that particular song wasn't in her collection anyway. That was Paul's music, the stuff he'd played for her edification when their parents had been at work and their youngest brother, Stephen, had been off playing football with the townies. They'd spent the very last afternoon of Paul's life that way, she sitting cross-legged on his rumpled bed and patiently sticking hundreds of safety pins into his jacket as he flipped through his records and pulled out the ones he thought she ought to hear. He'd mussed her hair and promised to take her to a Sex Pistols show when she was just a bit older, and then he'd gone away and she'd never seen him again. But that song ...
"It doesn't mean anything!" she said sharply. The belief in signs was one of the most common superstitions out there, held not only by the deeply religious, but by those who subscribed to the vague brand of "spirituality" that was so popular these days. She'd heard more than one otherwise intelligent person wax on about how their late aunt or grandfather or husband was responsible for leaving coins with significant dates in their path, sending birds and butterflies to flutter round their heads, and - yes - causing meaningful songs to pop up on the radio at appropriate times. It was all a load of old rubbish, though. Coins fell out of people's pockets all the time, birds and butterflies did things for reasons of their own, and radios were not conduits for the whims of ghosts who wanted to communicate to their loved ones through music. They just weren't.
Gingerly, she poked at the radio button again, and this time got the expected news. The presenter's plummy voice filled the car with a lot of boring but soothing facts about parity for pensioners, until, with a slightly shaky hand, she switched him off again and bent down to pick up the fallen remains of her lunch.
---
Ten minutes later, she parked directly across from her own house - in the middle of the afternoon, the road was nearly deserted - and sat looking at her front door for a moment, thinking about how the lock had been iced over, how she'd pulled so desperately at the knob to get out. Everything looked ordinary and quiet now, but there was a crawly feeling down her back all the same - not the cold she remembered from last night, but the sensation of someone watching her. The front windows looked like blank, open eyes. Perhaps she would go round the back instead.
Slowly but resolutely, she opened the car door and got out, trying to look as normal as possible in case the nosy old man across the way was peering through his curtains again. She wondered if his nosiness would extend to coming over to see what was the matter if he heard screams inside her house, and decided that it probably wouldn't, although he might report her for making too much noise.
Best try to be killed quietly, then, she thought with a touch of dark amusement, and closed the door softly.
The gate that led into the side return was locked, but she had the key- at last her habit of carrying around the keys to every lock she owned, something for which Robert had often teased her, was paying off. The gate hadn't been opened in months and it resisted being asked to open now, but at last it complied, and then she was through it and into the back garden. It looked damp and neglected at the moment, waiting for next year's long summer evenings to come. It did not, however, look haunted, and she felt a little better, and hopeful that she would soon be telling Alison that her services were no longer required.
That feeling was all too short-lived. About halfway between the side return and the glass conservatory wall, something greyish and soft-looking lay on the ground, like a small pile of old cloth. It was not until she had nearly stepped on it that she realised what it was, and forgetting all need to be quiet, let out a scream.
"Oh God, Alec!"
She fell right on her knees in the soaking leaves and yellowed grass, keys and bag spilling forgotten to both sides, and scooped her cat up in an utter, abject panic. He was sodden, limp and cold to the touch, and at first she was certain that he was dead, but then he made a feeble noise and raised his head to sniff at her cheek, and she clutched him tight, full of mingled relief and terror.
"What happened to you?" she whispered into his wet fur. "What did this, what did this?"
"Barbara, Christ, what's the matter?" Alison's voice came from behind her, and Barb was on her feet in half an instant, with Alec cradled against her breast like a baby. Alison had an insulated paper cup in her hand and a startled, enquiring look on her face, and the very sight of her brought all the old resentment and loathing rushing back, like a tsunami sweeping away everything in its path.
"Where in the flaming hell have you been?" she spat. "You said you were coming here in the morning, and it's afternoon and you're only just arriving. My poor cat is half dead and you've been faffing around getting coffee and doing God knows what else - I thought I could trust you because Robert trusted you, but I can see I was wrong - I was -" She stumbled to a halt, not sure whether she wanted to burst into tears or strangle Alison with her bare hands, and looked down at Alec in her arms.
"He's hurt," she said helplessly. "I have to take him to the vets. What am I going to tell them?"
Alison shook her head. "Don't worry about that yet. Here, let me see him."
Barb hesitated, but then relaxed her protective embrace a bit so that Alison could look at the injured cat and gently feel of his neck and legs.
"I don't think he's broken anything," she said, glancing up at Barb, "but he's very cold, just like you were last night, and it looks as if he's been tossed around a bit." She paused. "Look, I know I said I would be here earlier, and you can be pissed off at me if you like, but can we just save it for later? You couldn't pay me to go into that house right now, not after this, and I won't let you go in either. Let's get Alec - it's Alec, isn't it? - let's get Alec sorted out, and then you can tell me all about what an awful person I am. I might even agree with you."
"Fine," Barb said, in a tone that meant it wasn't fine at all. "Do you suppose you might spare your coat so I can wrap him up?"
"All right." Alison put down her coffee cup, shrugged off her coat - a tatty old brown wool thing that looked as if it had come straight from a charity shop - and held it out. Barb laid Alec in the middle of it and folded the edges round him, leaving an opening for him to breathe, and then gathered the bundle of coat and cat into her arms and bent to collect her keys from the ground. As she straightened up, she looked at the house, and for a wild moment she thought she heard Paul's voice again; not the way it sounded when she imagined it, but like the muffled voice of a real person calling from a distance.
Get out of here, Barbara Anne. Hurry up. I can't --
"Let's go," she said abruptly to Alison, and the two of them left the garden.
TBC
