The Ghosts of Sleath Read online

  ‘Fine. Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Bit early in the day for me, sir,’ the landlord replied without a hint of disapproval. ‘Thanks all the same. So, touring, is it?’

  ‘Uh, no. D’you get many tourists?’

  ‘Ah.’ Ginty picked up the cloth from the shelf beneath the counter and mopped up a puddle. ‘We’re a bit off the beaten track for too much of that, an that’s the way we like it.’

  It was the first time Ash had heard a landlord-cum-hotelier relish the lack of custom, and Ginty must have seen it in his expression. He stopped wiping the bar and gave a short laugh. ‘We’ve got enough locals hereabouts to keep us busy without being invaded by grockles every spring an summer. A few ramblers’ associations an suchlike visit us, o’course, but they know it’s in their own interest not to blab to the whole world and its mother. I keep a room or two available for the odd occasion, but mercifully they’re few and far between.’

  Ash mentally shook his head in wonder, but decided he liked the attitude. Places like Sleath, where tranquillity was preferred to commercial opportunism, were rare in this shrinking domain, so good luck and God bless ’em.

  ‘So you’ll be here on business, then?’

  He suspected the question was not as light as the landlord pretended. In fact, Ginty was examining a mark on the bar-top (one that had been there for a good many years judging by its polished shine) a little too intently.

  ‘I’m here to see the Reverend Lockwood, as a matter of fact.’

  Ginty’s head jerked up immediately, but he looked beyond Ash’s right shoulder, possibly making eye contact with someone else in the bar.

  ‘I’ll be gettin the wife to see to your room, sir,’ the landlord said, some of the friendliness gone from his tone.

  Maybe he doesn’t like his local vicar, Ash mused as he sipped the bitter. Or maybe he’s not keen on talk of hauntings going outside the village - it might attract too many curious visitors. ‘Can you tell me how to get to the vicarage from here?’ he said quickly as the landlord walked away.

  Ginty paused in the doorway leading off from the bar. ‘Straight up the village High Street till you reach a fork in the road,’ he said stiffly. ‘Take the right one, up the hill to St Giles’. You’ll find the vicar’s place a bit further on from the church. Big lodge house, you can’t miss it.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Minute or so if you go by car, ’bout ten if you walk. Room’ll be ready when you get back.’

  Ash noted a hint of regret in the last words. ‘Thank you,’ he said, but Ginty had already gone through the door. Ash drained the last of the vodka, and then the bitter. As he left the lounge he realized that all the customers were watching him openly now. And even the three ‘mouchers’ in the other bar had fallen silent.

  6

  HE STEPPED OUT into the sunshine and looked right, and then left, absorbing the village, breathing in its air, testing his own sensitivity. This was something he had learned to do in recent years for, after a long time of denial - almost a lifetime’s, in fact - he had come to realize that his perception could be different from that of others, that he often had an awareness beyond normal capabilities. The faculty had always been there, but it was only three years ago that he had been forced to accept its reality. Before that, scepticism had blocked the self-knowledge. No, why did he persist in fooling himself? Fear had been the barrier. Fear had made him refuse to acknowledge this special faculty. Until something had happened, a haunting so genuine and so personal to him that all denials were swept away, all barricades breached, by a truth that was as overwhelming as it was terrifying.

  Ash shuddered in the sunlight and forced memories aside.

  Sleath was a perfectly normal village, a little more picturesque than most and certainly more tranquil than many. Yet still he felt an underlying tension here, a disquiet beneath the calm surface.

  He chided himself as he walked to the car. Hadn’t he just thought he’d run someone down before he got to the village, and wasn’t he still a bit shaken? Added to that the innkeeper’s sudden hostility, no doubt caused by a resentment towards strangers poking their noses in where they didn’t belong, had enhanced Ash’s unease. Such tensions could easily confuse perceptions.

  He drove the car across the road into the parking area beside the green, deciding to walk to the vicarage. A few nips from his flask earlier, plus the vodka and beer he’d taken in the Black Boar Inn, would have put him on the drink-drive borderline and, although it was unlikely that the village had its own police patrol, he wasn’t about to risk losing his licence again; the inconvenience was too great. Besides, the walk would do him good, clear his head, allow him to take in more of the place. And it was turning into a fine day for exercise.

  To the south he saw the faint, lingering colours of a rainbow. The spectrum faded before his eyes, dissolving like an illusion dispelled by enlightenment; like a false intuition dismissed by logic.

  Ash locked the car and began the walk to Sleath’s church and vicarage.

  He crossed the road at an angle, passing by the inn and then the small collection of shops and houses, the latter varied in style, ranging from oak beams and plaster to brick and tile. The two old ladies were still on the bench close to the stocks and whipping post and they watched him as before with forthright curiosity. He gave them a courteous nod of the head for the hell of it, together with the best smile he could muster, but received no such recognition in return. They continued to stare, following his progress along the High Street until he was well past them. Still he felt their inquisitive gaze on his back.

  He continued to smile for the last two drinks he’d had, combined with the peacefulness of the village, were finally settling his nerves; he wondered if he might not actually enjoy this assignment. Too many times he’d been cloistered in dismal houses, waiting through the night and wee small hours of the morning for something unusual to happen, something unnatural to stir, freezing his butt off, smoking too many cigarettes - and thinking too much of the past.

  He quickened his pace, refusing to allow the familiar bleakness to temper his thoughts, its chill kindled by memories and perpetuated by nightmares. His breakdown after the Edbrook affair had sent him to the edge of insanity - there were those at the time, he felt sure, who thought he’d been driven over that edge - and the slow recovery had been due to a numbed acceptance rather than rejection of what had happened inside that corrupted mansion. His cynicism towards the supernatural had been checked, although he, himself, had not entirely been converted, for he still believed there were fraudsters, fabulists and fakers involved in the hereafter industry (and industry is what it had become): charlatans and cheats who extorted money from the bereaved, quacks who fooled themselves as much as their gullible disciples, and rogues who engineered, and even invented, the paranormal circumstance for their own nefarious or self-aggrandizing purposes. What would he find in Sleath? Even the fact that he had been summoned by a man of the cloth, one Reverend Edmund Lockwood, did not mean the hauntings were genuine, for Ash had dealt with neurotic or misguided clergymen before, their religion no protection against misjudgement or their own madness. Which was, as a rule, why the Church preferred to deal with such matters itself rather than bring in outsiders and risk public mockery. Ash wondered why it had been the local vicar or his representative who had contacted the Institute and not his superiors. Was the diocesan bishop even aware of his cleric’s initiative? If so would he have agreed to the investigation? And wouldn’t the bishop have wanted to be directly involved? These were just some of the questions the Reverend Lockwood would have to answer.

  Not all of the houses Ash passed by were quite as quaint or as distinctive as those around the village green; nevertheless, with their slate roofs and rough red-brick frontages they still maintained a certain country charm. He noticed one whose huge chimney breast rose from ground to rooftop, dwarfing the front door by its side; another house close by was so thin it scarcely seemed habitable.

/>   He reached a point where the roads branched left and right and, noticing the church tower on the gentle hill in the distance, he took the right fork.

  For some reason he paused outside a row of three neat cottages with brightly painted yellow doors, their front gardens tiny but proudly kept. His attention was drawn to the middle one, as if he expected someone to appear in the doorway there. He waited, but nothing happened. Yet still he had the feeling of being watched.

  He glanced up at the small window above the front door as if expecting to catch a face peering down.

  There was no one. But could an observer have stepped back from view just before Ash had tilted his head?

  He felt a coldness again, a familiar chill that was contrary to the heat of the day.

  Voices, those of children singing, came to him, and he looked away from the cottage towards the source. Further along the road stood a building that could only have been a school, for a yard was laid out before it, this bounded by a shoulder-high fence. The children’s muffled voices drifted to him in high-pitched unison, untrained yet pure, and their chant was a hymn or nursery rhyme that he vaguely recognized.

  Distracted, he moved on, walking in the road, for there was no pavement here. He became aware that even the birds had stopped their song to listen to the children.

  He drew level with the single-storey building: it was built of grey stone and its windows were high and light-friendly, reaching up to a roof of faded red tiles. The school door was arched, like the entrance to a church, and its green paint was chipped and puckered. A sign, this too chipped and dulled with time, by the school gate proclaimed: SLEATH PRIMARY SCHOOL FOR BOYS AND GIRLS. He listened to their voices as he walked on, the song a little ragged here and there but hauntingly sweet to the ear:

  Dance, then, wherever you may be,

  I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

  And I’ll lead you all,

  wherever you may be,

  and I’ll lead you all

  in the dance, said he.

  His steps became more laboured as the road’s incline steepened and he was soon cursing himself for his lack of fitness. He consoled himself with the thought that at least the effects of the liquor would have burned off by the time he met the vicar. The singing behind him quickly faded. The church tower loomed above the treetops up ahead, a square-shaped structure of cobble flint. There were buttresses at each corner and a single lancet window gazed down from near the top like a wary black pupil. Ash dabbed perspiration from his brow with a handkerchief. A long row of conifers set behind a low stone perimeter wall screened much of the church grounds, but Ash caught glimpses of headstones and tombs through the gaps here and there. Something white was moving among the monuments, but when he paused to peer through branches the figure was gone. He moved on, momentarily cheered by the sweet repetition of a song thrush; a blackbird joined in, its rich call powerful in the stillness of the day. The sun glared off the road, its image reflected in a few shallow puddles.

  When Ash reached the lychgate he decided on impulse to look inside the church before going on to the vicarage; there was a chance the vicar might be there. The shadow beneath the gate’s canopy brought instant relief from the heat of the day, and he lingered for a moment or two to take in St Giles’. In the course of his work over the years, Ash had had cause to study the histories of several such churches and he guessed this one, with its rising buttresses, knapped-flint walls, and large oak doors guarding a projecting porch, was of thirteenth-or fourteenth-century origins. The stained-glass windows were dull on the outside and their very opaqueness gave the structure a tomb-like air, as though it were sealed tight against the world. Impressive, but hardly welcoming, Ash mused, like the village itself.

  The gate was stiff when he pushed through and he was soon perspiring again as the sun beat down on his bare head. He removed his jacket and loosened his tie as he trod the pebbled path leading through the cemetery to the church porch. Several of the monuments and headstones were turgidly elaborate, one or two of them even incorporating tableaux of grimed angels as sentinels, while most were unimaginatively functional. Large areas of the church grounds were unkempt, with only glimpses of lichen-covered markers peeping over the long grass, and at the far boundary the undergrowth was shamelessly wild. Old oaks and spruce rose here and there, so close to certain graves that their roots undoubtedly intruded upon the caskets below.

  One half of the porch’s venerable double-door was open and Ash entered. Like some waiting predator, cool, dark air immediately slid through his clothing to claim his flesh for its own and he could not help but shiver. In that single instant the chill seemed almost parasitic, an umbrous wraith who sought to steal his warmth and freeze his senses. It was an absurd notion and shrugged off as quickly as it was imagined; yet Ash remained still for a moment or two longer, puzzled by his own reaction. Something was not right with this place. Not just with this church, but with Sleath itself. There was something here - something hidden - that generated a strange disquiet. Nothing obvious, nothing tangible, for the rural charm of the village was undeniable. Yet that charm was superficial. Ash felt it as surely as he had felt the sun on his face outside this shadowy portal, as surely as he had heard the school children singing, or the birds calling. This sensing was as real to him as the very stone in the walls around him.

  He glanced over the notices pinned to the board on the interior door as if for assurance that all was normal here despite his unease. They told of an upcoming bazaar, a bring-and-buy sale, a Women’s Institute meeting, a show, The King and I, in the next parish, the forthcoming council meeting, times of church services - all perfectly commonplace. Where were the times for the next Black Mass, or Satanic Rites evening? Perhaps more mundanely, but equally as sinister, where was the notice for the Sleath Paedophiles’ Dinner-Dance, or the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan’s monthly meeting, or the Bestial Pursuits Society’s fête? No, there was nothing out of place here, nothing extraordinary to cast suspicion. So why the doubts, why the foreboding? Was there really something wrong in this peaceful little village, or was he still disturbed by past events? The true answer eluded him.

  Almost angry, Ash grasped the interior door’s ring handle and gave it a twist. It turned, but the door did not open. He tried again, but realized it was locked.

  The investigator was not unduly surprised. Nowadays not even holy places were safe from vandals or thieves. He rapped his knuckles against the wood on the off chance someone might be inside, but when no reply came he left the porch. He shielded his eyes against the glare as he closed the oak door behind him, but still caught sight of something moving quickly through the cemetery.

  A fresh sensation washed over him, and he swayed back against the door, resting against it for support.

  It had been a sudden yet subtle shock, no more than a mental frisson, a psychic flush that left him shaken. He blinked his eyes rapidly against the sun, but the figure was gone once more, leaving him to wonder if it hadn’t been imagined.

  Ash touched his forehead with the fingertips of both hands, applying soft pressure as if to ease away a pain. But it was his own agitation that he was trying to soothe. He dropped his hands to his sides and looked intently at the path.

  There had been someone there, he was sure of it. And that someone must have seen him. Why, then, would they dodge out of sight?

  Ash retraced his steps along the path, branching off where a small track led through the graves towards the rear of the church. Rain gargoyles peered down from points along the edge of the pitched roof, their grins seeming to mock. Suddenly cautious and not sure why, he slowed down as he approached the corner of the church.

  He almost came to a halt, for he sensed that someone was waiting there, just out of sight.

  Annoyed with himself, he picked up his step, hurrying now, as if anxious to confront whoever was in the graveyard with him. He knew he was being irrational, that this person had as much right as he to be on church ground; but then
why would they try to avoid him, why hide away like this?

  He reached the corner. He turned it. And stopped dead.

  7

  SHE WORE A WHITE unbuttoned shirt over a T-shirt and pale blue skirt, and her eyes, a slightly lighter shade of blue than the skirt, showed such abject fear that Ash raised a placating hand towards her.

  They stared at each other, neither one moving or speaking for several moments.

  Ash was stunned. And perplexed. It was as if an invasive energy had overwhelmed his thoughts, leaving him mentally cowed. He consciously pushed back, exerting his will against the inexplicable pressure, and in an instant his mind was free, his thoughts were his own again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he found himself saying.

  ‘What?’ She shook her head uncomprehendingly.

  ‘I must have frightened you.’ Or vice versa, he told himself.

  The woman straightened, her chin lifting as though she were reasserting herself. She was slim, fine-boned, her light-brown hair swept back in a tail that curled forward over her shoulder. In her hand she held a small bunch of flowers.