The Dead Speak Ill Of The Living (The Dead Speak Paranormal Mysteries Book 1) (36 page)

  
“I hadn’t realised Doctor Buckley would arouse so much interest! I must say
it’s wonderful to meet young people interested in the past.”

  
“Right, here we go,” Nazir said. “Not only does the house still exist, but when
Buckley vanished his niece took over the property, and remained there until the
Doctor was declared dead, the will read out, and the whole thing given to her.
She stayed there, and still stays there, but has left it like a museum.
Although this uses something less polite than that.”

  
“They think she’s a loony recluse in a dusty house and a wedding dress,” Dee
suggested.

  
“Exactly.”

  
“Does it say how many cats she’s got?”

  
“I get the strongest sense of seven or eight.”

  
The librarian wasn’t sure they the group scowled at the mention of cats, surely
someone couldn’t have had a bad experience with those noble killers?

  
“Are you planning a visit?”

  
They all looked at the librarian, then at each other. It did look like they’d
agreed to go without saying anything. Then Joe did spoke. “I have a feeling, a
real feeling, that we should look in this house. It’s been left, he vanished.
Maybe knowing what we know we can find a clue. If he did it first, he deserves
to be famous.”

  
“An excellent idea,” the librarian said, and very softly added “what do you
know?”

  
“We…err…”

  
“No, no you don’t have to tell me. My fault for asking.”

  
Dee leaned over to Joe. “Sometimes you let information go in order to make a
contact.”

  
“You think now?”

  
“Yes, I do.”

  
Joe smiled and turned to the librarian. “We have something to show you.”

  
The demonstration took twenty minutes, and that was mostly to give every ghost
who haunted their favourite old library time to speak. The one advantage of
telling a well-read occult archivist is they’re already able to process the
existence of a machine which could speak to ghosts, and already have a file
full of questions you want to ask. And it also meant that Joe and the group
left with the librarian on a retainer, rather than the other way round.

  
“Where exactly are we going?” Nazir asked from the back seat.

  
“You know where we’re going, you booked the bed and breakfast,” Dee shot back
from the driving seat.

  
“I know, but I’ve only seen white people for the last thirty minutes, are we
driving into a reserve or something?”

  
“Good old rural England,” Dee smirked.

  
“Well let’s not tell anyone about the machine, they’d probably stick us in a
Wicker Man.”

  
“Ducking stool for you Dee,” Joe added.

  
“Once we’ve quite finished torturing me, does somebody know whether it’s left
or straight on at this roundabout?”

  
“What happened to the sat nav?”

  
“It stopped at the last turn, currently thinks I’m doing circles.”

  
“You see, we’ve travelled so far even the satellite’s fucked up.”

  
The village they now arrived in was so chocolate box you expected a golden
rabbit to come racing down the road and cover you in brown deliciousness. It
seriously looked like a film set, and the foursome in the car climbed out
wondering if they’d gone back in time.

  
“Do they even have street lights?” Dee asked. They didn’t.

  
What they did have was a tearoom with ‘fresh scones’ on a sign in the window,
and they were soon four scones and four teas lighter. After judgement was
passed – very tasty, they’d come back again – the group checked in at their bed
and breakfast, and found a lovely old lady who was polite, charming and
completely unable to pronounce Nazir’s name, which had all four desperately
trying to stop laughing.

  
Then it was to their rooms. Joe went in and began to unpack, when there was a
knock.

 
“It’s me,” Dee said, “is yours super clean?”

  
“Oh yes, lovely.”

  
“Mine too. Immaculate. Makes me not want to take a shit.”

  
“Be sure to explode outside.”

  
“Seriously considering going back for more scones and some evacuation.”

  
“Ah, the sound of a lady,” came Nazir’s voice from behind them.

  
“I’m a lady,” Dee protested.

  
“Half the men I’ve fucked have been more ladylike than you.”

  
“Oh great, now I’m being compared to your boy sluts.”

  
“Are you sure Maquire isn’t expecting to find a penis on you?” Nazir began to
laugh, but Dee had suffered enough.

  
“No he did not find a penis,” she almost shouted.

  
Joe and Nazir caught on a second later. The former looked sad, the latter said “Oh
wow, you’ve broken your drought.”

  
“That I have. And I received no complaints.”

  
“You have a vagina, that’s usually the start and end of a guy’s requirements.”

  
“Maquire has standards, and I more than met them. And most definitely the other
way round.”

  
“Good, so what’s he like in bed?”

  
“I’m not telling you that!”

  
“Ah, something to hide?”

  
“A lady never talks!”

  
“That’s a gentleman, and I’m your gay best friend. So spill, how is he with
fingers, tongue, appendage.”

  
Dee noticed Joe was looking sullen and blushing brightly. “If we’re going to
have this talk, it won’t be in a corridor of a bed and breakfast. So everyone
unpack, we have business.”

  
If you asked a six year old child to draw a country house, he’d have created
what the quartet now stood in front of, only with straight lines and less
dinosaurs.

  
“Maybe we should just send the Professor in, I don’t think the rest of us are
classy enough,” Nazir mused stood in front of the beautiful but imposing
façade.

  
“I’m classy,” Dee protested.

  
“That’s not what you told me.”

  
“Let’s move this on,” Joe said and walked up to the door. He rang, a curtain
twitched, and then it opened. The lady in front of them was very smartly
dressed and clearly very old, but she gave each of them a piercing look as Joe
introduced them.

  
“Please, come in,” she said, and clearly didn’t mean to be polite.

  
They went through a small hallway and went into a large, high ceiled room where
everything seemed to be older than any of them save Pohl, and even then…

  
“I will fetch us tea, I shall return soon. Please don’t sit on any cats.”

  
The group looked around, and there were quite a few of the fluffy animals
staring at them.

  
“Is this immersion therapy?” Nazir asked.

  
“Just don’t look at them funny,” Joe said as he settled on a sofa that was
thirty per cent his, seventy per cent Lord Flufflesome.

  
A few minutes later a tray filled with china and teapot arrived. “I only have
Garibaldi’s, I hope that’s okay,” she said, again clearly not meaning it.

  
“Thank you, that’s lovely,” Dee said.

  
“You’ve come to ask me about my uncle, Jeremiah Buckley.”

  
“Yes.”

  
“People do still come you know, every now and again, but they all ask the same
thing. I’m getting tired of it quite frankly, and you might be the last.”

  
Joe nodded. “I assure you, we won’t ask the same questions.”

  
“Oh really? You don’t want to know about his work, his disappearance, or even
my failed attempts to turn this into a museum?”

  
She looked at him, bitter and fierce, and he knew she’d have thrown him out if
the memory of her uncle wasn’t so important, if there wasn’t a tiny shred of
hope that after all these years something would change.

  
“I believe your uncle invented a machine, using quantum biology, which allowed
him to talk to the dead.”

  
“That story has been around for decades, and people always come and ask, always
cheap journalists or writers on the paranormal.” She spat the words out.

  
“And you’d like a scientist to ask?” Pohl said.

  
“Yes, a scientist, just one, to take my uncle seriously.”

  
“I’m a scientist,” said Joe, “and I’ve also invented such a machine.”

  
“Then why are you here?”

  
“Because if he did it first he deserves to be known.”

  
“Show me.”

  
Joe produced the machine, put it on the desk, and switched it on.

  
“It doesn’t work,” she said. At which point they all heard a strange rustling
sound, maybe even a distant cough.

  
The lady looked at the machine, looked back at Joe, and held out a hand. “I’m
Emily, welcome to my house.”

  
She questioned him about the machine for ten minutes, and then asked “why are
you here?”

  
“Because…”

  
“No, what do you hope to achieve? What do you hope to find?”

  
Dee decided to try tact. “You have kept the house as a museum, many rooms
untouched. We hoped that, with our experience of making and using this machine,
we might find something no one else ever did.”

  
Emily put a hand to her mouth, touched it for a brief moment, and looked at the
machine. There was something going on in the back of her mind, and they
couldn’t tell what.

  
“You’re welcome to look around. I live on the ground floor, my uncle used all
the upper rooms and they are preserved. But you must tell me first if you find
something.”

  
“Of course.”

  
The group finished their tea and climbed the stairs, looking round a hallway
covered in a layer of dust.

  
“What do we do?” Pohl asked.

  
“Take a room each, work along.”

  
“And what are we looking for?”

  
“Anything even remotely useful.”

  
They spent the rest of the day searching, looking for anything about
disappearances, machines, speaking to the dead, and found nothing. Emily kept
them fuelled with tea and cakes, and soon there was very little of the house
left. This was how Joe went up another flight of stairs and found himself
opening a door into a small attic room. He had to bend down because the roof
sloped in triangles above him, and he nearly coughed on the dust, which was
even worse up here.

  
The room was largely empty, with just a wardrobe in one corner, a rickety
looking table and a small chair. Joe went in, sat down, and tried to imagine
Buckley in here, having made a major discovery and then… and then… what did he
do with it? Did he piss someone off? Did he run away? Did he open a door into
another world and go through? Was there a world of scientist snatching demons
he’d been unaware of?

  
Joe looked across the room. No demons in here. He sighed, stood and turned to
leave, but remembered he’d not searched inside the wardrobe. He considered not
bothering, because they were out of luck, but turned and went out of the
dedication which had produced a doctorate.

 
Opening the doors he was surprised to find clothes still in it, and he leafed
through. Ladies clothing, which was what you’d expect in a cupboard, but a
little odd as Buckley had lived alone. So was this Emily’s or… what was that?

  
Joe pushed the clothes to one side and peered in. One section of the wall was
darker than the rest, and as he touched it he felt wood. Wood? What was he
really seeing here?

  
Oh shit.

  
Emily forced herself up the attic steps and went into a room she’d ignored for
decades. There a trio stood, as Pohl had been the one to fetch her and was
following behind.

  
“What is it?” Emily said.

  
“There’s a door behind this wardrobe,” Joe explained. “It’s got no back, and it
abuts the walls and a door. So if Nazir and I do this,” and the pair pulled the
wardrobe across to the right. And lo, there was a door.

  
“Good lord,” Emily exclaimed, moving swiftly forward and putting a hand on it.
There was no handle, but as she pushed hard the door swung open. Inside was
dark, but the group had collected torches from their kit in the car, and they
guided Emily inside.

  
What they saw was dust, at first, a white coating of mountains and valleys, but
soon this landscape was understood: they were in a 1930s laboratory, with
equipment and notes scattered everywhere, sealed away from the world since
before a world war.

  
“You’ve found it,” Emily gasped, “you found Jeremiah’s work.”

  
“Oh yes,” Nazir grinned. “Chalk another one up for us losers.”

  
“We’re making a habit of getting things right,” Dee smiled.