Under a Ghostly Moon (Jerry Moon Supernatural Thrillers Book 1)

UNDER
A GHOSTLY MOON

Liam &Beverley Moore

UNDER
A GHOSTLY MOON - by Liam &Beverley Moore

© Copyright 2011

Liam and Beverley Moore

The right of Liam and Beverley Moore to be identified as authors of

this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All Rights Reserved

No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the

publisher, or in accordance with the provisions

of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 843866 54 1

First Published in 2011

Vanguard Press Sheraton House Castle Park Cambridge England

Revised for Kindle 2013

Liam and Beverley Moore live in North Wiltshire and are owned by five cats.  Liam is a registered nurse who now works as a technical advisor for a medical equipment firm and Beverley teaches English.  When they met Liam and Beverley discovered a mutual interest in writing and, shortly after they married, decided to work together to achieve their dream of becoming published authors.

'Under a Ghostly Moon' is the first novel created by this new writing team.  The inspiration for 'Moon' came while Liam was living in Bristol, which boasts many haunted pubs and possibly the most haunted hospital in England.

'To all our friends and acquaintances in Bristol who have inspired this book, both the noisy living and the unquiet dead.'

It was a dank, lightless place, which smelt of damp rust and mildew.  Festoons of ancient spider webs hung like ragged black lace from high corners and iron beams.  The oldest of these had taken on an odd permanence where rusty water had transformed their silken strands into ruddy stalactites.  In one dimly lit corner, where a single shaft of sunlight was grudgingly admitted by a rusty ventilation grill, stood an indistinct figure illuminated by the rippling reflections cast from a ruddy pool.  It wore a dark, round brimmed hat, a dirty, white, open-collared shirt with rolled up sleeves and moleskin trousers tucked into the tops of a pair of worn hob-nailed boots.  A pick-axe was gripped in a pair of pale, work-scarred hands, which rose and fell as it dug silently into the floor, leaving not a mark and making not a ripple in the rusty puddle that filled the bottom of this iron chamber.  On his left hand, where a wedding ring might fit, a silver claddach ring glinted, as if with the light of a different sun.  The ring's twin lay, six metres below under earth and concrete, blackened and twisted, around a skeletal phalange in the hand of an ancient corpse.  It recalled the memory of a promise made to a Kerry girl so many years ago, now never to be kept.  But Connor O'Flynn would keep on trying, till Doomsday if necessary, to complete Brunel's wonderful bridge, ever toiling unaware that the structure that he laboured long to complete and in the construction of which he had lost his life, now towered above him in all its glory and had done so for over a hundred and fifty years.

The mind of a ghost can be very single-focused and dedicated to a pin-point purpose.  Connor remembered some fuss at the bottom of the foundation pit, a bit of confusion before he was back on the job.  He often wondered vaguely why his workmates had started ignoring him and why they had eventually disappeared, but his main concern was to get this thrice bedamned pit work done so he could be paid and off home to marry Mary and buy her a farm.  Very little pierced his focus but one thing did now.  It was a nasty little sound, a snake-slithering, spider-clicking, hackles-raising sound.  He turned hesitantly to seek its source and what remained of his soul was pierced by the paralysing gaze of a pair of glowing blue eyes that hung above a mouth filled with jagged fangs.

"
I have come to end your toil, navvy,"
a voice like the greyness of death hissed dryly through those teeth. 
"You should thank me."

Then Connor felt all the desperate purpose that had held him earthbound for so long simply drain away as bluish tendrils of life-force snaked away from his spectral form into the empty blackness of the being that fed from him.  “Mary!” he cried wretchedly as his consciousness dwindled.  Finally, all that remained was a tiny blue speck, floating above the rusty puddle with nothing but the faintest memory to hold it there.

"Ah!"
hissed the dark spectre with obvious satisfaction. 
"Farewell, little shade,"
it said.  With a vile, gurgling chuckle, it dissolved into the lesser shadows and disappeared.

             
In Bristol Royal Infirmary's Casualty Department's Resuscitation Room the uneasy calm of a, so far, unusually uneventful night was shattered as the ‘Resus’ staff gathered into an ordered huddle around one of the trolleys. At the centre of the surrounding web of wires and tubes, a teenage girl hung tenuously on the very edge of death.

"
Did we get the toxicology results back yet?" Gary Wong, the medical senior house officer, asked the team in general.

             
Jerry Moon, a staff nurse, ran to the bedside waving a flimsy printout slip.  "Right here," he said, steeling his sense of smell against the mixed odours of vomit and urine emanating from the girl's soiled clothing.  Normally, he would have quipped something like: "hot off the press," but he wasn't in a joking mood.  He had read the printout when he had taken it from the printer and knew the kid had taken a highly effective combination of killer drugs.  A deep sinking feeling in his gut told him they were going to lose this one.  All in all it was far too high a price to pay for being jilted by some spotty sphincter of a seventeen-year-old, who would probably have become no more than an unpleasant memory, given a year or so.  "It doesn't look good."

Seething with impotent irritation, Wong ripped the printout from Jerry
's unresisting fingers.  "Let me be the judge of that, Moon!" His eyes quickly scanned the printout.  "Oh bugger!" he sighed, his Tyneside accent, made more pronounced by emotion, seemed out of place with his Asian appearance - Wong was a fourth generation Chinese immigrant whose family had moved to Newcastle in the 1900s.  "How the shit did the stupid kid manage to get her hands on both morphine
and
antidepressants?"

"
Her mother has advanced breast cancer," replied Jenny Wilson, the 'Major End' Sister.  "Shelly here, must have raided her mum's medicine cabinet."

"
Respirations are far too low and her blood oxygen saturation level's in her boots.  We need to get some Narcan into her now!" urged Wong.

Moon
grabbed a vial of the anti-morphine injection from a nearby trolley and showed it to Jenny, who checked the medication and its use-by date and then took the proffered syringe, drew up the drug and handed it to Wong, who quickly injected it.

The child
's respiratory rate picked up gradually, but there were other problems.  The vital signs monitor began to alarm again as Shelly's heart rate became erratic.

"
Fuck!" exclaimed Wong, as the monitor trace degraded to the aimless wavering pattern of ventricular fibrillation.  "She's arrested! We'll have to shock her! Hook up the defibrillator please, Jenny." However, despite their best efforts, they could not revive the girl.  The lethal cocktail she had taken had done its deadly work before her mother discovered her lying comatose in her room.  The few minutes it had taken for the ambulance to arrive had carried her over the fine margin of time they had needed to save her.

Putting an oxygen mask over her face to prevent the other patients from realising that there was a corpse passing by them in full view, Moon helped push the trolley bearing Shelly's body out of the resuscitation area.  He noticed Wong and Jenny heading for the relatives' room to inform the girl's parents. 
Poor sods
, he thought, trying to ignore the dim figure that he sensed drifting at his left-hand side -
"Not now, Love, wait until we're alone."

La
ter, as he and Tracy, a health care assistant, were leaving the side cubicle where they had just had finished laying Shelly out, he muttered a brief excuse and slipped back into the darkened room.  Shelly’s pitifully small looking corpse had been cleaned and wrapped in a disposable shroud.  Only her face was exposed, glowing ethereally in the light of the halogen floodlights outside of the shuttered the window.  A shadowy figure seemed to melt out of the darkness that gathered in one corner of the unlit room as the girl's shade moved to hover, indistinct but still recognisable, at the end of the trolley.  
"So that's me?"
she said softly,
“Or should I say, ‘Was me’?

"
Yes," replied Moon knowing that only he could hear that peculiar thought-emotional wavelength the dead used.

"
...I didn't mean it to go this far, you know."

"
I know," replied Moon in a low whisper, "kids your age seldom do." Ghostly silver tears shone on her face.  Moon watched her coming to terms with her own death, aware that

Tracy
was waiting and might appear any time looking for him.  "Look, we don't have much time here..."

Suddenly a huge apparition emerged from the left hand wall and leered at Shelly. Its crimson eyes glared and flashed as it snapped at her with a maw full of needle-like teeth. The young ghost withdrew sharply through the wall with a terrified shriek.  Moon waved his hand, dispersing the ghoulish creature with a grin on his face.

"Don't let Gordy upset you.  He's just an old tramp who died here a few years ago and still hangs around now because he likes to put the wind up newcomers and passing psychics."

"You're no fun Mooon!"
moaned Gordy as he coagulated into the form of a shabby old man and drifted away through the closed door of the cubicle leaving behind a parting whiff of cider-breath and unwashed body.

Shelly cautiously reappeared through the opposite wall and blinked her eyes tearfully at Moon;
"What do I do now?"

"Well, that's pretty much up to you, but if you want my advice I’d suggest you head for the Source and complete your destiny.  That’s what most
folks who pass away here seem to do.  It's pretty easy to identify from your side according to the one or two people who’ve stopped long enough to chat.  A ‘big bright light like a beacon that lights up the whole spiritual plane’, so they say."

"
But...  My mum, she'll be frantic!"

"Not wanting to sound unduly callous, but you should have thought of that before you took all those pills.  If you try to sort it out now you'
ll only make things worse.”

“I c
ould try to explain…”

“She wouldn’t hear you -
very few of the living can.  Ghosts who hang around on Earth, trying to fix the things they've left undone, tend to end up stuck here.  After a few years they forget why they stayed and degenerate into a run of the mill haunting.  Do you really want to hang around as a ghost for centuries until you finally just fade away?"   Shelley shook her head miserably, her long silken curls dissolving at the tips into vaporous wisps.  The unearthly beauty of this effect caught Moon by surprise and it was a second before he remembered to breathe.  "I thought not,” he continued.  “There are rules to how things should happen even in death, you know.  The
Powers that Be
- whoever or whatever
they
are - seem to have it all worked out."

A sharp, malicious smile spread over Shelly's shadowy features:
"Nothing wrong with giving Sean and that slag Sally Hopkins a good scare though, is there.  I'll teach them to go together behind my back! "

"I wouldn't..."   Moon began, but Shelly had already evaporated in a cloud of ectoplasm.  “Just don’t hang around too long!” he called after her as loudly as he dared then shook his head.  Some people would never listen.  He walked out of the cubicle waving his pen, the retrieval of which had been the excuse he had given for going back into the room.

"Took your time," observed Tracy curiously.

"It was caught in the shroud," he tucked the pen back in his pocket.  “It was a bugger to find!”

"Ugh!"  Tracy pulled a disgusted face.  "I'd have left it, it's only a ballpoint."

"Yeah, but you know how hard it is to get hold of a pen in here.  They're like gold dust."

"You're a skinflint, Jerry Moon.  I buy my own."

"Just add it to my long list of endearing eccentricities," replied Moon with a wan grin.

Tracy smirked back. "That list's too long already, Moon, as you well know."

"I didn't know you cared."  Moon was glad that
Tracy’s love for trading insults had distracted her from the length of time he had spent supposedly searching Shelley’s corpse.  He could cope with being labelled a skinflint in preference to people thinking he had an unhealthy obsession with death.

Moon finished handing over his patients to the day shift at about seven-thirty a.m.  The rest of the night had been pretty typical Accident and Emergency fare.  There had been the usual parade of drunks, heart attacks, drug overdoses and nursing home referrals (for some reason there were always a few of these each night).  He'd been threatened with a knife once and had to change his hospital blues twice, once because he'd been vomited on and the second time because a patient had bled all over him (while attempting to threaten him with a knife).  There had been two deaths: Shelly and a male cardiac arrest victim, who was DOA and had presumably left his spirit hovering somewhere above the M32 motorway in the wake of the speeding ambulance.  He was glad he only did the occasional Bank Nurse shift in Casualty, as a regular job it would be too demanding.

It was a thirty-minute walk from the Infirmary to the second floor flat Moon rented in a large Victorian house in Redland.  He usually enjoyed the walk, which helped him calm down after his shifts but today he was still too worried about Shelly for the journey to be of much benefit.  It was bad enough for the other healthcare staff having to cope with the death of such a young patient but Moon had to worry about whether he could have handled things better after she died.  Could he have said anything that would have stopped her rushing off and potentially wrecking her afterlife?

Moon had no real explanation for his special
'gift'.  He supposed he had always sensed atmospheres and intense emotions but, he had dismissed most of that as a mixture of good body language interpretation, as well as being endowed with an over- fertile imagination, before he realised that he was beginning to see and hear the dead.  His latent talent had fully awakened shortly after he had made his career change into nursing.  It was probably his first experience of death at first hand that had been the catalyst, but, regardless of what had caused it, he now had to share most of his waking hours with the restless spirits of the dead.

Moon had completed his nursing diploma five years before and had worked in a couple of ward-based posts before finding his niche working on the night pool at Bristol Royal Infirmary
.  Nursing during the dark hours in that ancient building, parts of which had sheltered the sick for nearly three hundred years, he was exposed on a daily basis to the wide variety of spirits and spooks that inhabited its wards and corridors.  As a nurse he felt responsible for his patients but he felt it really should end when they passed over, unfortunately, they had other ideas.  Often he came home more exhausted because of the problems of the departed than those of the living and he had become a reluctant expert in the afterlife just to cope with it all.

"What are you?"

His journey home took him up Marlborough Hill, which ran along one side of the newer of the Infirmary’s two sites, and through Cotham, the affluent area that dominated the hilltop behind the more recent part of the hospital.  At the top of the hill he crossed over a small grassy area, where he paused to look back over the city where it lay, misty and new, splashed with gold by the rising sun.  He then turned right along Cotham Brow, which breasted the hilltop. His path took him past an old, Victorian gospel hall, the front of which was still in shadows, untouched by the new day.  Glancing at the dark doorway, he was surprised by a faint, glimmering motion in the darkness.  He drew closer and was amazed to see three dancing blue globes spiralling in the gloom.  “What are you?” he whispered, stretching his right hand towards them.  “Ghost moths?”

As one of the ghost globes passed through his hand he felt a shudder of cold and what seemed to be a distant memory of the tearstained face of a young girl, perhaps three or four years old, passed throu
gh his mind.  The fleeting image was accompanied by a sense of inconsolable loss.  Another globe brushed against his head, thrusting the distressing image of a hand holding a bloodied knife into his memory for an instant and filling his being with an intense wave of guilt and shock.  Moon was perplexed, these were clearly some kind of spirit form but unlike anything he had previously encountered.  Fascinated, he watched their dance for a minute or so, experimenting by passing his hands through their substance, but all that each seemed to hold was a single overpowering memory and the ghost of the emotions that went with it.  The third globe’s memory was no more enlightening - just the vivid image of a pair of Victorian woman’s shoes married to the desperate desire to own them.  Eventually he gave in to his growing fatigue and stumbled his way back to his flat unaware that, almost invisible in the sunlight, the three tiny globes detached themselves one by one from the doorway and followed, dancing in his shadow.