Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes Read online

  Outside the sky was starting to turn. The clouds hung low, and there was a dark grey mix in the air as though the sky were trying to hold onto the light. It was a battle it was losing, and one it would fight and be defeated on every night in a cycle that would last long past my life and the life of any children I had. A sliver of silver moon cut a pale shape.

  Jeremiah started to read.

  3

  “I know you’re not the sort of man to mince words, so I won’t mince them meself. From what I read you’re a travelled man, and you’re learned, but you’re grounded to boot. I never got the idea that you were anything more or less than exactly what I saw. That’s why I like reading about you.

  Well I got something for you. Have you ever been to Scotland? You’d like it, I think. Don’t go to Glasgow. Edinburgh’s alright, if you want to do the tourist thing. I’ve got a much better place for you. You could come to my village. I think you’d find it interesting. I’ll tell you the tale of why, but you’ll have to forgive me setting it on paper like this because I know it will seem hard for you to read. I’ve found that you can’t control your emotion on paper the same as you would with a face. Don’t you agree?

  There was this lass. Seven years old, black hair, good mum and dad. A nice little village girl. She’d grow up to be a bonnie-un. But there was something sour about her. You got a sense that something was off, like she were empty. Other folks apparently thought the same, but I'm not here to give their opinion.

  You might be reading this knowing exactly who im talking about. Or you might not have a clue. It didn’t make many newsrags, for some reason.

  But a seven year old girl killing herself is pretty news worthy if you ask me.

  I know I know, you didn’t ask me.

  Her folks haven’t said much about the whole thing. Can’t blame them. Meself, I didn’t dare talk to them. I wanted to. I wanted to tell them how sorry I was, and that things would get better, and that for what it was worth I didn’t think their girl was bad for doing what she did. Suicide is a sin is some folk’s eyes but I say the sin lies with the people around them, the ones who should be watching for those little signs that’s everything not alright.

  I’m getting worked up now, and I didn’t mean to do that here. Because I know you’re a rational man and you wouldn’t come if you thought I was being emotional. But we need you to come, Jeremiah.

  The girl would be seventeen now. Since then my body’s sagged a bit. I’ve been engaged and then found myself single. I’ve had a dog that I got as a puppy and then buried him when he was seven years old. The village is a little bit darker, the buildings older. Lots of folk have forgotten about her. They’re the lucky ones.

  Some said that she killed 'erself because she hated the world and everything in it, and she wanted to wipe every trace of herself from existence. Pretty deep thinkin’ for a seven year old eh? There was something going on behind those young eyes. Something very old and very sick. Something there that shouldn’t have been.

  Years on, those of us who still remember her are the ones in trouble. Because she comes for you. People have died, Jeremiah. Anyone who’s acknowledged her existence in the light of day or dead of night, has died. They say she comes at night. She knocks on your bedroom door.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  She’ll carry on all night until you answer. She’ll never leave save for day break, and then at night she’s back. Knocking on your door. The knocks getting louder and louder until you answer or tell her to come in. Once she’s in your room she stares at you. You can try and look away all you want but you’ll feel that glare on your face, daring your eyes to meet hers. And once you give in and look at her, well you’ve acknowledged her again. She knows that you can see her, that you know she’s there.

  So they say anyway. I thought you might be interested.

  As you can probably imagine I’m not telling you my name because if you do come here, you’ll be wanting to ask me questions. And there’s no way I could answer them because I’d have to tell you about her, and she’d know that I knew she existed. I figure I’m safe in writing this down because she was seven when she died and she probably couldn’t even read too good. But then, they say there’s something terrible living behind her eyes. And maybe that thing, whatever it is, can read.

  I’m so desperate I can’t sit back. I have to send this.

  Maybe by the time you come here I will have left the village. Gone to live in Edinburgh, or even Glasgow. Anywhere but here.

  Yours,

  Anonymous.

  4

  He folded the letter and put it back between the pages of the book.

  “So what do you think about that?” he said.

  I knew this was a test. In fact, it felt like everything was a test with him, as though he were always watching me and scoring me. Maybe he was looking for an apprentice - someone to travel round the world with researching creepy urban legends. Maybe I should just give up on the masters, forget about the stress of the assignments, having to live on a shoestring budget, never having time for anything but study. That actually sounded like a good idea.

  But what did I think about the letter? Without being patronising, it was clearly written by someone uneducated. Someone with an active imagination. I tried to think back through Professor Higson's course, because I was sure we’d studied something like this. And then it clicked.

  I cleared my throat. “The girl is a representation of guilt. The letter was probably written by a man who lost a child - not this one because he’s gone to great lengths to disassociate himself with the girl he talks about - and he’s never really found a way of coping. Either that or he is looking for attention. I don’t imagine a life amounts up to much here. It will just be work, sleep, pub. You’ve got to get your kicks from somewhere.”

  “Ever considered the chance that it’s true?” said Jeremiah.

  I let the thought turn in my head for a second and then scrapped it.

  “No way.”

  “So what would you do next?”

  I pulled my cardigan closer to me. The air was biting even indoors, and I doubted the stone walls would be much good against the cold during the night. In fact it looked as though they might store the cold and hold onto to it, and then seep it out during the day to make sure there was never a second where you felt warm.

  I tried to think about what the next step would be. I put myself into Jeremiah’s shoes, and I knew that he was looking for this sort of stuff to be true. He was chasing the occult, the other, and his next action would be to build up the evidence. But where to begin?

  The writer of the letter had chosen to remain anonymous, so that was a dead end. Maybe they could ask Marsha? No, best to leave that old hag out of it. She looked too nosy for her own good, and the last thing they needed was their business spilt all over the village. That didn’t leave many options other than the village’s births and deaths register.

  “If we’re going to try to find out if this is true, we need to know if a girl actually died here recently. No girl, no ghost.” I said.

  Jeremiah, rushed to his feet, his calf muscles propelling up his frame faster than I thought possible. A look spread across his face, as though his brain synapses were live electric wires and what I said had jolted them. Like a buzz spread through his skull, across his forehead and through his cheeks. He held up a finger.

  “Rule one, Ella. We never try to prove something is true. What do you get if you are trying to prove something to be true?”

  I looked up at the ceiling. I had the term on the tip of my tongue. My brain wasn’t working well today. Maybe I was coming down with a cold.

  “I guess you’d try to make facts fit what you were looking for.”

  “Confirmation bias.” he said.

  He walked over to the window and looked out. I couldn’t see the view with him stood in the way. He turned back around and faced me.

  “Always try to prove something to be false. That’s our game. Look for th
e doubt. Find the bullshit.” he said.

  “But won’t that also be confirmation bias? Confirmation that something isn’t true?”

  “True, but this is the good kind. Because I’m looking for something to be real. I want a fucking real life mystery that shows there’s something else to this world, Ella. And before I do that, I want to know I’ve put it through the wringer. That I’ve looked through it so carefully that there’s no room for doubt.”

  I needed a pen and paper. I wanted to make some notes, because my assignment had suddenly come to mind. Finding out Jeremiah’s motivation for what he did was going to be one of my focal points, and he had just handed part of it to me on a plate. “I want a real life mystery that shows there’s something else to this world.” There you had it; that’s why he travelled the world on a whim.

  There was more to it, I sensed. Wanting a sense of the other, that was a common idea. That was why UFO sightings, the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot all picked up so much attention. As science gets better at explaining why the world behaves the way it does, right down to the atoms bouncing against each other in a blade of grass, people crave mystery.

  We don’t want to know exactly why things happen. So we invent things that can’t be explained, can’t be proven. Nobody can ever prove that UFOs don’t exist. They can disprove an individual sighting, sure, but you could never disprove all of them. The mystery of them excites people. It gives them the hope that there might be something else in the world other than the grim reality that we all muddle through.

  So what about Jeremiah? Was it escapism for him? I looked at him as he perched against the window frame. He wore black jeans that were tucked into heavy Doc Martin books. He wore a thick jumper, a shirt collar poking out of the top. Practical clothes for the cold Scottish countryside. I saw a man who was dedicated to his calling to the exclusion of everything else. His whole life was probably an act of escapism, and it must have been from something in his past.

  Was it this Bruges incident that the professor was so obsessed with finding out about?

  Jeremiah walked to bed and sat down again. “So I’ll ask again. What do you think we should do next?”

  Oh good, I was getting chance to repeat my exam.

  “If we’re going to prove that everything in the letter is false, we should start with the facts. And the biggest one for me is the little girl. Let’s prove that no little girl died in the village recently. That should put the whole thing to bed.”

  I realised that I was talking about the death of a little girl brazenly, as though this were an academic exercise. What if we checked this and there really was a little girl who died? A sad little girl who killed herself, as the letter said? This becoming a little too real for me. I was used to the abstract comfort of textbooks.

  Jeremiah nodded his head. “A good a place to start as any. That’s what we’ll do, tomorrow then. Tonight we get some sleep.”

  I nodded, thankful that we were done for the night. My arms and legs felt heavy, and I felt the faint tap of a headache behind my eyes. I sat for a few seconds more. Jeremiah looked at me expectantly and I realised I was in his room.

  I stood up and walked to the doorway.

  “Tomorrow we solve the case of the non-existent ghost girl.” I said.

  Jeremiah nodded.

  “Lock your door tonight” he said.

  5

  My phone alarm woke me up the next morning. I looked at the time and it read 5:55, and I looked at the signal bars and there was nothing there. An alarm clock was the only thing my phone was useful for all the way out here; the mobile companies hadn't thought it profitable to extend their signal coverage to reach a village of fifty-something people.

  I stood up and dressed for breakfast. I felt shivery even when I was fully dressed, and the headache still tapped away at me. The back of my throat felt raw. Great, I thought.

  Jeremiah was in a sullen mood over breakfast. He was reading a book when I walked downstairs into the main pub lounge. He didn’t put the book down, and if he saw me he gave no indication. I sat across from him at the table.

  “Morning.” I said.

  He closed the book. “Yep.”

  Outside the window, the village was in twilight. Situated in a valley of steep Scottish hills, I didn’t imagine it saw much light even in the summer. It seemed like a place that was comfortable in the darkness, and that the people living there had grown used to it.

  Jeremiah wore a claret woolly jumper, and the same jeans as the day before. His trusty long coat covered the ensemble. His beard seemed to be longer than yesterday, but maybe I was imagining that. They didn’t grow so quickly, surely? It was a good beard, I decided. One that matched his face well, because I got the impression that under it he had something of a weak chin and saggy cheeks. The beard covered up for that and gave him a grizzled look.

  I decided that I’d try to interview him over breakfast, because we were going to be busy today and it was evident he wouldn’t answer my questions while we worked.

  “I thought this would be a good time to get some of my questions done. You know, so we have the rest of the day to look into the girl.”

  “No chance. I don’t want to be interviewed over breakfast. Besides, you don’t really know what I’m about.”

  “Isn’t that the point of the interview?”

  “Some things you can’t get through asking questions.”

  A door opened behind me. Marsha walked out of the pub kitchen carrying two plates. Stream rose off the top of them. She put a plate in front of me. There was sausage, bacon, beans, mushrooms, eggs. My stomach turned.

  “I didn’t ask for this,” I said.

  A look of annoyance crossed Marsha’s face. Like it was too much trouble for her. As though she didn’t want them as guests, and even the money they were paying wasn’t compensation enough for their presence.

  “He ordered for you,” she said.

  Jeremiah shrugged his shoulders. “What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t eat meat. And I can’t eat this,” I said.

  Marsha stared at me, her eyes not comprehending the idea of a human being who didn’t eat meat. I pushed the plate away.

  “I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I can’t have this.”

  Marsha’s eyes snapped back. The confusion gone, the annoyance returning.

  “Just have the beans and the egg. Eat around the meat.”

  “I can’t. The meat has touched everything.”

  I knew I was being picky, that was the worst thing. I could see why it would annoy Marsha. Hell, I got annoyed when I was in restaurants and I saw someone being really choosy about their food. But I just couldn’t eat meat. The idea of it turned my stomach to mush.

  Marsha picked up the plate and walked back to the kitchen.

  “Vegetarian, eh? Didn’t have you down as one of those. You know, those pigs would be slaughtered whether they were on your plate or not. They were destined for someone’s belly, and that’s that.”

  Jeremiah sawed at a piece of sausage with his knife. He dipped it in the egg yolk and then lifted it to his mouth. I caught sight of the white sausage gristle and felt my face turn green.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “The slaughter doesn’t bother me, because like you say, it will happen. Meat just knocks me sick.”

  “Humans are carnivorous by nature. It’s strange that you should be born the opposite. There’s a story behind this.”

  I nodded. “It was something that happened in one of my foster homes. But I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Jeremiah put his knife and for on the table. “Come on. Just when you were getting interesting you clam up.”

  I sensed an opportunity.

  “One good turn for another,” I said.

  I had him, I knew it. He wanted to know my story, and I wouldn’t tell him until he gave me some of the information I wanted. I had seen a chink in the armour and I’d shot an arrow right through it.

  Jeremiah seeme
d to be turning the idea over in his head. Should he answer my questions? Or should he choose to remain an annoying enigma? He picked up his knife and fork again. He stabbed a piece of bacon and lifted it to his lips.

  “No,” he said, before swallowing the bacon.

  6

  After breakfast I went back to my room and showered. I put on my coat, headed downstairs and followed Jeremiah out of the pub. I had chosen my thick coat with the fur-lined hood but I still wasn’t prepared for the gust of wind that hit me as soon as I stepped outside. The sky was starting to lighten now. It looked like a cup of black coffee with milk being dripped into the middle.