Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes (4 page)

“What are you hiding?” I said.

Murray glanced at me without turning
his head, making it look like he sneered at me.

“It’s a simple mistake, nothing
more.”

“This was torn out, Murray,” Said
Jeremiah.

“Accidents happen.”

“What are you hiding?” I said again.

“Probably a relative who wanted the
record for their family.” The words strained out of his mouth, as though he’d
just thought of them and didn’t believe in them.

“Cut the shit,” said Jeremiah. “This
was torn out on purpose for a good reason. I think you know who did it and why.
How about you tell me before I report you? This is a public record and I’m sure
your bosses would like to know that you let it be used as a scrap book.”

He looked up. The colour drained from
his cheeks like oil leaking out of a barrel. The whites of his eyes seemed to
spread out and threaten to wash over his pupils. His fingers curled tight
around the edge of the book.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,”
he said.

“Then tell us,” I said.

He stared at me. There was something
behind his eyes that made them wide and hollow. Something that sucked the blood
out of his cheeks and left  them white as chalk. Seeing him look like this sent
icy fingertips tapping down my spine. Suddenly I didn’t want to know what had
happened with the book. I felt like it was information I shouldn’t listen to,
like I should put my fingers in my ears and run.

Murray slammed the book shut and
dropped it to the floor. The thud echoed across the room and drifted out into
the hall. A spray of dust kicked up from the carpet and then drifted back down
to the ground.  Murray put his hands on his hips. His cheeks started to flood
red again.

“Thank you for bringing the problem
to my attention,” he said.

Jeremiah breathed in and straightened
his back. Standing with good posture he was six foot four inches tall and
towered over most men. His large frame seemed to fill half of the room. If this
intimidated Murray, he didn’t show it.

“As a matter of public record,” said
Jeremiah, “I’ve got a right to know what happened to that page.”

The blood pumped back into Murray’s
face at a rate that made him look like a swelling balloon. His shoulders shook,
and it was only through great effort he kept his arms at his sides.

“As a matter of public record,” he
said,” I suggest you get the fuck out of my office. Our doors are shut to
strangers who go where they’re not wanted.”

8

The  hearth of the pub hissed like a
snake and spat fiery venom across the room. Usually a roaring fire would be
pleasant, but this one looked angry. The flames burned with an intensity I had
never seen before, as if they smouldered with a silent fury. Marsha had to
throw  extra logs on every twenty minutes as the flames ate through them. She
stopped every so often to tell an impatient bar customer to ‘piss off’.

We sat just ten feet away from the
fire. It was so hot that Jeremiah had taken off his coat and rolled his jumper
sleeves up to his elbows. As much as I could see that the room was warm, I
couldn’t feel it. I wore a thermal t-shirt, a jumper, a coat and a scarf but
the cold still managed to sneak its way through and smother my skin. I turned
my chair to face the fire so that the flames spat toward me, but it was like
someone rubbed me with ice. Not just the outside of my skin, either. It was
like my insides were freezing.

Outside the pub the darkness peered
in through the window, so heavy that it was like a presence watching us. There
was something about the village that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I
always got the feeling that someone was watching me. It didn’t matter if we
were at the graveyard, the town hall, the pub or even my own room, it always
seemed like an unseen pair of eyes stared from the shadows.

I crossed my arms and rubbed my hand
up and down my sides to shock some warmth into my body, but the friction didn’t
do a thing.

“You look like shit,” said Jeremiah.

Every other man in the pub had a pint
of larger, bitter or cider. Jeremiah had a ginger beer. People spoke in murmurs
around us, as if they guarded their words so that they didn’t leave the
confines of their tables. Every so often I was sure a man or woman shot a
glance at me. A dog sat under a table to our right. Its fur was black like crow
feathers, but it had fallen out in places. It lifted a weak paw and scratched
its ear, then lowered its chin to the ground.

“Thanks,” I told Jeremiah. “You’re a
charmer.”

“Seriously, Ella. You should get some
kip. I can’t be dragging your arse around all day tomorrow. I don’t want you
getting in my way.”

“Again, charming.”

My head banged with the throb of a
tribal drum. My skin felt sensitive and shivery, as if someone with an icy hand
was touching me. I wanted to shake the hand off, but no matter how many layers
I put on it stayed there. My throat burned like I had swallowed nettles and my
nose gushed.

I stood up and pushed my chair out.

“I’ll be a minute,” I said, and
walked toward the loos.

When I came back I had stemmed the
flow of snot from my nose, but my throat still felt like I had drank acid.
Jeremiah looked at me, raised his glass and tipped the ginger beer into his
mouth.

“I ordered for you,” he said.

“You couldn’t have waited?”

“Marsha asked. And I was hungry.”

A shiver ran through me. I pulled my
coat closer. Every inch of me wanted to crawl upstairs and flop into bed. I
couldn’t do that, though. There would be time for rest at some point but for
now I had work to do. This was a rare moment where we weren’t visiting graves
or looked through death registers, and I had an assignment to finish. I thought
I would try a different tactic.

“Bruges is lovely this time of year,”
I said.

Jeremiah put his glass down on the
table with enough force to be on the wrong side of slamming it.

“Professor Higson loves playing with
his puppets, doesn’t he?”

“I’m here because I want to be.”

“You’re here because he’s tugging at
your strings. And you’re not the first.”

I felt my forehead screw up and a
steam of anger rose in my chest. It was true that Higson had helped persuade me
to come on the investigation, but in the end I made the choice myself. There
was no way I would let myself be manipulated.

“Believe what you want,” I said. “I’m
here because I thought this would be interesting. Turns out you’re as full of
shit as the fields around this dump.”

Jeremiah leaned forward and grimaced.
“Did you ever hear about a student at your university called Billy Wilkins?”

I thought about it but I couldn’t
place the name. “Nope.”

“You won’t have. Because he dropped
out from his course and checked into a mental health facility.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because your friend Professor Higson
convinced me to take Billy out with me to an investigation years ago. Billy
wasn’t ready for the things we saw there.”

Ice spread across my back and slid
across my skin. I reached for the zip of my coat but found that it was already
pushed up as far as it could go. I felt someone stare at me from across the
pub. It was a shape in the corner of my eyes, too fuzzy to make out who it was.
I felt their glare on my face and my skin started to itch. I tried to focus on
Jeremiah but I couldn’t ignore it.

My heart drummed in my chest. I
turned my head but nobody even looked at me. A man at the table across from us
dropped a stack of cards face up on the wood and smiled. He leapt out of his
chair and pointed at his friend.

“You owe me a pint you bloody
bastard!” he said.

I looked at Jeremiah. “Isn’t it your
fault for taking Billy with you?”

Jeremiah shook his head. “He was an
adult, just like you. My point is, don’t let yourself be manipulated. Not by
Higson and not by me. If something happens to you when you’re with me, that’s
on you.”

My throat felt cracked, like burnt
cake hardened on a baking tray. I tried to swallow but it felt like the skin
inside my neck was stuck together. A crushing weight pressed down on my
shoulders.

“What does Higson want to know about
Bruges,” I said. “And why won’t you tell him?”

“You’re not letting this go, are
you?”

“You promised to let me interview
you.”

Jeremiah put his hand to his chin and
breathed in. He stared at me, weighing up the decision of whether to answer my
questions as if he were Caesar deciding the fate of a gladiator. As he opened
his mouth to speak Marsha appeared at our table. She had two bowls in her hands
and a scowl on her face.

She set one in front of Jeremiah and
the other in front of me. It was a bowl of stew. The broth was thick and brown,
and potatoes and carrots rested at the top like barrels floating in the sea.
Steam rose off and twisted up my nose. The smell of it was enough to make my
mouth water, and my stomach cried out for the nutrients the stew would give.
Jeremiah had done something nice for once. Was the world about to end?

I dipped my spoon into the stew and
then brought it to the surface, making sure to get a good mix of liquid and
vegetables. As I swallowed the broth and chewed the potatoes, I felt something
gristly between my teeth. I twisted it on my tongue trying to work out what it
was. When I did, acid rose up my throat. I put my fingers in my mouth and
pulled out a sinewy piece of beef. My stomach wobbled and my throat tightened.

“What the hell is this?” I said, my
voice weak.

“Beef stew,” said Jeremiah, and
brought his spoon to his lips and sucked the juice off it.

“I told you I was vegetarian.”

“And now I believe you.”

I felt my cheeks burn as if imaginary
fingers pinched them. My stomach screamed at me and begged for some of the
stew. At the same time I felt my chest grow tight with anger at the man sat
across from me. His complete lack of respect for anyone but himself was
shocking.

“No wonder you’re alone,” I said, my
words dripping with venom.

“I wanted to see if you really were
vegetarian, or if you just like the idea. If you can turn down a stew when you
feel like shit, then you’re true to your ideals. Not many people are these
days, Ella. I respect that.”

“Shove your respect up your arse.”

“What made you be vegetarian?”

I wasn’t going to tell him. If he was
going to avoid my questions and play games, then he wasn’t going to learn a
damn thing from me either. Despite deciding I wouldn’t tell him about it,
thoughts of an old foster family rose in my head like worms crawling out of the
dirt.

 It was my third foster family. The
bad one. I was six years old, too small to sit properly in my seat. The dining
table was so polished it glinted under the light of the chandelier above.
Expensive watercolours were spread across the walls of the dining room, and the
red velvet curtains were drawn. The watercolours were of family members who had
died over the years, and the further back the line went, the uglier the faces
became.

Foster dad sat at the end of the
dining table, so far away that when he spoke it was like he whispered. Foster
mum was in the middle, keeping as far a distance as she could from both me and
her husband. The light was dim enough so that we could still see each other as
we ate, but the faces of my foster parents were covered in shadow. The
atmosphere was drenched in ice. By this point I had given up asking them to
turn the heating on. I stopped begging for a coat or a jumper. I stopped
expecting them to put me to bed or to even talk to me.

They sat and shovelled morsels of food
into their mouths. Their stares were blank, as though their brains had been
emptied. Sometimes I caught foster dad looking at me with a sneer on his face,
but when I stared at him the expression dropped. Foster mum was a husk, an
empty sack of skin that moved around the house like a ghost.

I looked down at the plate in front
of me. I was so hungry that my stomach felt like it was twisted into a knot. My
last meal had been two nights before, and my tiny body cried out for more food.
I felt like I was wasting away.

The steak on the plate was cold, and
I picked up my fork and poked it. The sides of it moved, and I saw that maggots
twisted and turned along the meat. I let my knife and fork clatter onto the
table. I pushed my chair back. My stomach felt like it had liquefied.

“Sit down,” said foster dad.

I gulped. The maggots crawled along
the beef.

“Sit down,” he said, his voice
firmer. “Get in your seat and eat your meat.”

My stomach sent an anguished tremor
through my body, and I nearly doubled over in pain. I knew I had to eat it. I
picked up my knife and fork and flicked away the twisting maggots. I cut a
piece of the meat and brought it to my lips, the smell getting worse the closer
it got. I closed my eyes and wished I were dead.

“Earth to Ella.”

Jeremiah leaned in close to me. He
snapped his fingers, and the clicking sound punctured my thoughts and brought
me back to the pub, back to the flickering hearth and hushed conversations. He
folded his arms and breathed out a sigh.

“I’m going to the library,” he said.

“It’s pitch black and it’s eight in
the evening. It’ll be shut.”

He shook his head. “I made a deal
with the librarian. A bottle of whiskey goes a long way around here.”

I  stood up out of my seat. As I
moved away from the stew, my stomach beat against my skin as though it were
trying to break through and dive into the bowl.

“I’ll come with you.”

“Not a chance in hell,” he said. “You
look like the crypt keeper. Go upstairs and get some sleep. I’m hoping I’ll
have a lead for us tomorrow.”