The Dead Speak Ill Of The Living (The Dead Speak Paranormal Mysteries Book 1) (37 page)

  
“Success is a habit,” Emily confirmed, “but one that needs practicing.”

  
“Very zen.”

  
Pohl brushed dust off a pile of papers. “The ink has held, and he has such a
marvellous style of writing. Puts me to shame.”

  
“What does it say?”

  
“This seems to be a log of experiments. Something for you to decipher Joe.” But
he was occupied elsewhere.

  
“Joe?”

  
“I think this is the machine,” Joe said, looking at one part of the lab.

  
“The machine?”

  
“Yes, a device for talking to the dead.”

  
“Are you sure?” Emily asked.

  
“No. No I’m not. But it seems to have a speaker, and there’s an old battery
attached to it, so it’s something that needs power, and the only object of this
type in the room. So if you’ll permit me to hook up a new battery, we can see.”
Joe ran out as Emily nodded, and soon he returned carrying one scavenged from
his machine. It took moments for he and Nazir to hook it up, check, stand back
and grin at each other. Then Joe flicked a lever.

  
“You are my heir then,” came a deep voice from out of a gramophone like
speaker.

  
“Yes,” Joe whispered.

  
“I’ve haunted this house for many years, wondering if anyone would find my
collection, terrified that whoever did would consider me a crank. But to have
it found by someone who not only believes me, but who has done it themselves…
astounding.”

  
“Why didn’t you speak downstairs?” Emily asked angrily.

  
“I was in shock. I never knew what to say when the situation needed alacrity.”

  
“But what happened to you uncle, where did you go?”

  
“Ah. Foul play. I was murdered by Fazackerly.”

  
“Who?” Dee asked.

  
“Doctor Ernest Fazackerly, the only other person I knew of developing quantum
communication. He came here to talk, we argued over my success, and he killed
me, dumped my body in a trunk, and hid my laboratory. I would have expected
someone to realise, but no one ever did. Emily here didn’t exactly clear the
old place out. In fact she hardly touched it.”

  
“Uncle, I… I… we must stop Fazackerly!”

  
“No need to do that, he was older than I, he’ll be long gone. But there’s
something I never understood. Why isn’t he famous? Why aren’t Fazackerly
machines allowing communication with the dead all over?”

  
“A good question,” Nazir said, and pulled out his phone.

  
“What is that?”

  
“I can access a world-wide collection of all human knowledge.”

  
“On that little box?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“He mostly uses it for pornography and cat pics,” Dee explained. Nazir ignored
her.

 
“Don’t lean on that” the voice barked.

  
“Sorry, sorry,” Pohl said.

  
“Uncle, be polite, she’s more qualified than you.”

  
“Pardon?”

  
“Professor Pohl of Cambridge University.”

  
“Well, I… I… a pleasure to meet you. I regret I didn’t live long enough to
acquire a chair.”

  
“With your discoveries you’d surely have been made a Lord.”

  
“That would have been an adventure. But what entry does that box have on
Fazackerly?”

  
“Well here’s the interesting thing. There is very little on Doctor Ernest
Fazackerly, very little indeed. No wiki page…”

  
“What does that mean?”

  
“It means he’s really fucking obscure…”

  
“There are ladies present.”

  
“…almost nothing.”

  
“Almost?”

  
“Well, his laboratory still survives. His descendants still own it, and they’ve
turned it into a small museum.”

  
“I see.”

  
“Don’t get jealous, it’s a tiny museum, more a labour of love, they get about
three visitors a month. It doesn’t say what happened to Fazackerly, just hints
at a tragedy of some description.”

  
“I see…a tragedy. I’m not sure how I feel.”

  
“Well he killed you, you should hope he got raped to death by polar bears who
ate his still shuddering corpse.”

  
“I see you’re no lady” the voice judged Dee.

  
“Don’t you fucking start or I’ll get an exorcist in.”

  
“Hmmmm….”

  
“That sounds ominous,” Pohl said.

  
“If there is some sort of museum, perhaps you could visit and find out exactly
what happened to old Fazackerly.”

  
“I must say uncle, you seem remarkably well disposed considering you were
murdered.”

  
“A lot of time has passed. I have… become used to it. I am more interested in
what happened, and there is no chance of revenge.”

  
“We can visit,” Joe said, “it will be a pleasure.”

  
Pohl laughed and everyone looked at her. “I think I’ve the perfect excuse, and
one which you will all like.”

  
“Good. But first I’m sure Joe would like a long discussion with me.”

  
“Oh yes!”

  
“Good. Emily, would you be so kind as to make everyone an evening meal, and Joe
and I can talk while you others, err…”

  
“We can help Emily,” Dee suggested.

  
“It is feeding time for my children.” It took a while before they realised she
meant the cats, and then they looked nervous. “What’s wrong with cats?”

  
“Oh Emily, have we got some stories to tell you.”

  
The group had grown to expect their data gathering to include a little light
breaking and entering, so to ring up the Fazackerly family and invite
themselves along for a little chat was a little unusual. Perhaps it shouldn’t
be, but Pohl had a plan, and when she spoke to Susan Fazackerly and pitched her
idea it all seemed to work. The Fazackerly house was in the same county, there
was no need to change bed and breakfast, and they could make a day trip of it.
Perfect, and Emily insisted on providing a full packed lunch for them.

  
With a hamper containing tongue sandwiches and no resolve to eat them, Dee drew
her car up outside the Fazackerly residence. It was similar to Buckley's, if
the former had suffered years of neglect because of a family’s parlous
financial situation, and Pohl became rather sorry for them. It wasn’t their
fault their grandfather had murdered a man and left them with a house they
loved but couldn’t afford.

  
Pohl marched up to the door, knocked, and put on her best smile. The man who
opened it looked like he hadn’t grinned in years.

  
“I’m Professor Pohl,” she said, “we spoke on the phone.”

  
“Oh yes, professor, so pleased to see you,” and he looked desperate. “And these
are?”

  
Pohl turned, and offered “my research assistants.”

  
“Three of them? Is that normal?”

  
“I am thorough.”

  
“Of course, of course. Please, come in.”

  
They entered a hallway, and were taken into a lounge, and found everything of
value had been sold apart from a small TV.

  
“Can I just check I have this right,” he said, not accusingly, but out of hope,
“you want to write an article, a proper academic piece, about the rivalry
between my grandfather Ernest Fazackerly, and a man called Jeremiah Buckley.”

  
“Yes,” and she said it honestly, because that’s exactly what she was going to
do. Albeit with the murder toned down a lot. Possibly entirely. “I need to look
at the papers in your archive to do so.”

  
“Of course, of course, I have removed my grandfather’s diaries for you to look
at. But, err, do you, err… do you think it’ll be a hit?”

  
“A hit?”

  
“He means will people start visiting the museum?” Dee said, forgetting her role
as smiling and sweet research assistant.

  
“Oh yes,” and Pohl was suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to make these two men
scientific heroes involved in a battle and not a recluse murdered by a rival.
She closed her eyes, regained her scholarly faculties, and said again “I can’t
comment on the museum, or on what I’ll find.”

  
“Understood. I, err, better find you a bigger room, if all four of you want to
go in.”

  
Dee resumed smiling. Nazir waved a notebook. Joe, with his earpiece in,
couldn’t hear anything resembling a human ghost. Just a dog which wasn’t going
to shut up until something that spoke dog explained just what the fuck was
going on.

  
Mr Fazackerly swiftly arranged extra seating in the old library, which was old
in the sense it had used to be a library before all the books had been sold off
to pay for repairs and was now a series of sad shelves in search of a use. A
round of tea was served, although the budget didn’t stretch to biscuits, not
even digestives, and the group were given their target: a large cardboard box.
Inside they found the diaries: ten of them, each one covering a year, hardback
volumes filled with a tiny but neat handwriting.

  
“I just love touching items like these,” Pohl enthused, flicking through to
take everything in.

  
“They are powerful,” Dee said, as looked at another one. But they had a job to
do, and so the diaries were divvied up. Dee took the dairy for the year Buckley
was murdered, Joe the year after, Nazir the year after that, and Pohl the final
diary, the year Fazackerly, well, what did happen to him?

  
They were expecting a need to read between the lines as they sped read through
each volume, but were surprised to see how candid and open the man had been.
Dee observed that Fazackerly had been in a race with Buckley to create a
quantum device for talking to the dead, even though the former hadn’t been
trying to do that but found himself on the path by accident, and there was a
growing unease in Fazackerly’s writing that his work was about to be wasted as
Buckley would get there first. And an anger at the accident. When these hints
turned into a rumour the rival had really made a breakthrough something seemed
to snap in Fazackerly, and he went to confront Buckley. And there, written
neatly in the book, Fazackerly explained how he’d lost his temper, strangled
Buckley, and dumped the body, then covered up a lab he didn’t understand.

  
The rest of the diaries shared a common theme: a man who knew you could
communicate with the dead because it had been done, but a man unable to find
the breakthrough himself. As time passed and he failed and failed again he
began to drink, get depressed, and the debts piled up around him. He devoted
himself to one task, spirit communication, and failed utterly in achieving it
even though it was possible. He wasn’t bringing money in, the house was
draining him, the family were pushing him, and then it became too much.

  
The diaries now grew haunted by the idea of suicide, of giving up, of moving
on, of taking poison and going to communicate with the spirits in the only way
he could. This ideation grew across the final year of his life until his diary
was filled with morbid thoughts and little of life got through. And then, on
the final entry, Fazackerly wrote a suicide note and explained how he’d do it
and, in a final sentence, he explained he’d taken the poison and was waiting
for it to work.

  
“They found his body that evening, and he was buried within a few days. But
there was no one to continue his work, and whenever someone did look the notes
and machines over they concluded he was mad as well as suicidal and left it
alone. Now it’s all on display at the Fazackerly house and no one comes to
see.”

  
The quartet had made notes from the diaries, met back up with Mr. Fazackerly,
and said they’d found much of what they needed, but arranged a time for Pohl to
return and begin a more in depth search of the archive. She was determined to
produce the article, but all felt returning to Jeremiah and informing him was
more urgent.

  
This was how the quartet and Emily were sat in the attic, six cups of tea
served and one cooling where Buckley couldn’t touch it. Emily had made a point
of serving her uncle a meal and talking with him on the machine.

  
“So we were both wasted lives,” the ghost mused.

  
“I think I understand,” Pohl commented.

  
“I was cut short, killed by Fazackerly, but he was cut short too, killed by his
own failure. Neither of us lived to tell of our machines, all our work is lost.
It’s hard to feel any anger at him, fate punished him well enough.”

  
“A tragedy,” Emily added.

  
“A double tragedy,” the voice replied. “What will you do now?”

  
“I’ll write,” Pohl said, “I just have to decide how to handle the murder. And
there is still the question of getting you buried.”

  
“I think I’m happy as I am for the moment. But what about you Joe?”

 
“Me?”