The Parliament of the Dead (6 page)

Iona ate a silent breakfast with her mother; they glared at each other across their cereal bowls.  Then she rushed out of the house while Tiggy was brushing her teeth, and she wandered aimlessly for almost two hours killing time until she could meet Arthur on his next walk.

*   *  *

At length she made her way to Cleopatra’s Needle on the banks of the Thames.  The ancient Egyptian monument had been the site of many suicides and according to Arthur the area was haunted by a strange naked ghost.

A small crowd of tourists had gathered round the sign.  But there was no Arthur.  Iona smiled at the crowd.  They looked warily at her and seemed to tighten their grips on their cameras and handbags.

“It’s OK,”she said to them with a smile to try and gain their confidence (which was not easy with her usual pale make-up starkly contrasted with her dark eyes and lips)“I’m the ghost walker’s apprentice.”

The tourists did not seem impressed, so they waited.  And waited.

As the‘ghost walker’s apprentice’Iona was subject to increasingly hostile looks from the crowd.  They were looking at their watches and murmuring darkly to one another.

She wondered if she should make a run for it.  Having told everyone she’d worked with Arthur she’d felt responsible for their frustration.  Then, with the kind of impulsive eagerness that often got her into trouble, she beamed widely at the crowd.

“OK,”she shouted, as the tension reached breaking point and some of the tourists were starting to walk away,“gather round.”

The tourists eyed her suspiciously.  They looked unwilling to be told what to do by a teenage girl.

“I’m your guide for this Ghost Walk.”

“Hold on there a minute,”drawled a large American with a tiny camera round his neck,“you’re not the guy who took the other walk.”

“Yeah, well, old Arthur who usually takes this walk is sick today.  I’m his apprentice and I know all he knows, and with me you’ve got
added youthful enthusiasm
.”

The large American’s equally large wife spoke up,“Exactly how old are you, honey?”

Iona toyed with the idea of saying twenty-one, but she knew they would not believe it, so she settled for eighteen: old enough for them to listen to her. “Eighteen madam, but with wisdom beyond my years.”She winked at the crowd.

The excitement of addressing the group rose in Iona’s chest.  She had so many unanswered questions, and she was achingly tired after a sleepless night, but she wanted to take this tour.  She had listened to Arthur often enough, she knew the route, and she knew all the stories.

“OK, OK, Ladies and Gentlemen, our tour starts with Cleopatra’s Needle…”Iona imitated Arthur’s theatrical story-telling style as best she could.

She told how this was a popular site for suicides, and how strange figures were sometimes seen throwing themselves into the river by the Needle.

At first she wanted to be exactly like Arthur, and tell all the stories precisely as he had done.  When she reached her own front door, however, she began to deviate from the script.

“At this point Arthur would tell you about Sweeney Todd, but he’s a creep, so I’m going to tell you the story of the axe murderers’convention...”

Chapter Fourteen

Playing-cards
and Bandages

Later that night, in a dimly-lit room, four dark shapes were hunched around a very old table.

“Queen of hearts,”hissed a wheezy voice.

“Seven of clubs,”said the next figure, with the same wheeze in its speech.  As he spoke, his bandaged hand placed a card on top of the one before.

“Snap!”shouted the third figure, slamming a seven of diamonds on top of the pile.  A cloud of grey dust erupted from the impact of his hand on the table.

“No way man!”protested the fourth figure. “You always do that Nubkheperra.  You’re not allowed to look at the card before you put it down.”

“But I didn’t,”complained the third figure huffily, then crossed his arms in front of his bony chest.

“You said‘Snap’before it touched the table–you must have looked!” Some of the bandages slipped from the fourth figure’s face as he spoke, revealing his ancient skeletal features.  His waxy black skin was hanging off yellow bones.  All the players were dead: long dead.  They were mummies who spent their days in display-cases in the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum, and their nights bickering over games of chance.  It had been their nightly ritual for centuries.

“Henutmehyt is right.  You don’t play fair.” The first figure stood up, knocking the table over in his outrage. “It was the same in Egypt, just because you were Pharaoh...”

“But we didn’t have cards in Egypt,”the ancient King protested.

“No but whatever we played you still sodding cheated,”snapped Henutmehyt,“knuckle-bones, marbles, the snake game: you cheated at the lot.”

Suddenly they stood rigid and still, listening intently to a sound they’d all heard at once.  Although their ears had long since withered into tiny wrinkles of skin, their hearing was supernaturally keen.

“Quick, back to the sarcophagi!”

The mummies shambled down a dimly-lit corridor.  Their ancient limbs were dry and stiff and their joints rustled like old tissue-paper.  Although they were true ghosts and could float free from their long-dead bodies, they had taken to reanimating their mouldy cadavers after seeing a film starring Boris Karloff in 1932.

There was a sudden crash behind them as a black-clad figure smashed through a window.  The electronic wail of a burglar-alarm competed with rasping shouts of panic and the cackle of military-like radio messages.

“Father Pious, I’ve got three, no make that four targets, travelling west along corridor B.”

The mummies heard the voice behind them a split-second before the noise of gunfire filled the air.  One of the ghosts, that of Nubkheperra (the card cheat) abandoned his body and fled up through the roof.  His bandage-clad cadaver clattered to the ground.

Two more figures dressed in black appeared in front of the remaining mummies and opened fire.

Bodies that had been preserved for millennia, carefully excavated, transported and cared for by museum experts, were ripped to shreds.  The souls that had inhabited them were forcibly put to rest.

The ghost of Nubkheperra looked mournfully at his broken body from behind some stone tablets in a glass case.  His ethereal eyes narrowed as he turned them towards the black figures.

One of them turned to their leader“One got away Father.  What should we do?”

“The secular Police will be here any minute; we need to get out of here now,”came Father Pious’irritated reply. “He’s lost his mummy; he won’t cause any more trouble.” He paused and nodded towards the museum’s security cameras,“We’ll get the highwayman tomorrow night, then leave the country before we get too famous.” 

They turned and fled into the night, ancient bones crunching under feet as they ran.

Chapter Fifteen

The Eternal Battle

“So what next?” Morag asked Gibbs as they walked across Waterloo Bridge.

“We fight the eternal battle against despair.” Gibbs uber-gloomy voice was even more melodramatic than usual.

“How on earth did ye ever manage to get a job as a minstrel with that bonny, sunny disposition?”

“I never really enjoyed it,”Gibbs replied with a glum shrug.  “I wanted to be a thatcher and mend roofs.”

“Och why didn’t ye, wee hen?”

“My father was a minstrel and his father before him.  He wanted me to pass down the family traditions and songs.  But I could never remember the words.” Gibbs shuddered glumly, then suddenly, his eyes lit up -“But I was very good on the lute.” He pulled something like a small, rounded guitar out of his bag.  It was ornately carved in pale wood.  Like Gibbs himself, his lute was faintly transparent: the ghost of a musical instrument.

He smiled with a faraway look in his eye; Morag returned the smile as warmly as her irritation with this morose minstrel would allow.

He played a few notes and Morag was not sure if he had started the song or if he was still trying to tune his lute. 

Then he started to sing,“
There’s a lady who’s sure
…”

Morag felt the smile slip from her face.

“…
all that glitters is gold
…”

The singing was dreadful.

“…
and she’s buying
…”

Half of the lute’s strings were flat, and the rest were sharp.

“…
a stairway
…”

The chorus of howling cats that had struck up around them sounded more tuneful.

“…
to heaven
.”

By the time Gibbs had finished singing the first line Morag could well imagine how he had come to be a
dead
minstrel.  However, she was aware that Gibbs was her only friend in a strange city and even stranger afterlife, so she tried to change the subject.

“Och hen, that’s lovely,”she lied,“but are we nearly there yet?”

Gibbs looked around and seemed disappointed as he replied,“Yes, just around this corner.”

They were walking through dark and dingy streets.  For a moment Morag felt nervous: “Hadn’t we better quieten down?  It looks like a rough old part of town.”

“Dear lady, there’s no need to worry, the worst has already happened - you’re dead!”

“It’s no’the worst thing that can happen!”Morag shuddered, remembering her husband Harold’s cry as his ghost had been exorcised.

*   *   *

They finally stopped at an almost derelict building surrounded by closed-down factories.  The building had very few windows that were not boarded-up nor broken.

They looked at the list of names by a long row of doorbells beside the main door.  Morag tried to press the bell of the room they wanted, but her finger passed right through it.

“You’ll need a lot of practice before you can do that sort of thing,”explained Gibbs, as he leant through her and pressed the buzzer.

They waited for a few minutes and just when they were about to try the bell again, Arthur opened the door. “Gibbs!”he exclaimed,“How nice to see you, it’s been at least fifty years; and who is your young friend?”

Chapter Sixteen

Finding Arthur

Iona was elated, her ghost walk had been a success.  She couldn’t believe that the sightseers had accepted her stories.

She had even livened up the dull bits of the walk where Arthur would talk about the history of the streets and historic residents.  At these points Iona made up stories about serial-killers, carnivorous dustbins, and a nineteenth-century lady naturalist who had pressed flowers in life, and in death pressed lost tourists between the pages of her gigantic book.  Iona described how she had pressed Australians, Germans, French and Japanese, and, with a cross look at the large American couple who kept asking awkward questions, added,“all she needs to complete her collection is a couple from the United States.”

When the walk finished Iona had hurried down to the tiny South Bank office of‘London Sightseeing Ghost Walks,’but the office had been closed and it was next morning before she had found anyone there.

William, the man she had met before in the HQ, was there at ten the following day.  He looked horrified as Iona told him about Arthur’s absence, and even more horrified when she told him that she had taken his walk herself.

“How old are you young lady?”

Iona hesitated,“eighteen.”

“The truth.”

“OK, OK, sixteen.  But I’m very old for my age.”

“Blimey!”William ran a hand over his balding head. “If the Police found out I had a sixteen-year-old girl looking after a group of tourists I’d be finished.”

“It wasn’t my fault,”protested Iona.

“No young lady, I don’t suppose it was.  I’m not cross with you, it’s blinking Arthur I’m cross with.” William sighed deeply “He’s my best walker, but his heart hasn’t been in it lately.”

“Can I’phone him to see if he’s OK?”asked Iona as she took her mobile phone from her pocket.

“Sorry love,”shrugged William,“I haven’t got a number for him.”

“What about an address?”

William consulted his address book. “Flat thirteen, Shelly Apartments, Bloch Road.” He paused for a moment. “Not a good area for a young girl like you.  I’ll call in on him in my lunch hour, make sure he’s going to take his tours today.  He’d better have a blinking good reason for missing his walk!”

Iona didn’t argue, but she repeated the address over and over in her head as she bid William a hasty goodbye and ran to the nearest newsagent to look up Bloch Road in a London A to Z.

Chapter Seventeen

‘We’re for vengeance’

“So how long ago did you die?” Morag asked Gibbs as they turned away from Arthur’s road.  They were walking through roads illuminated by the sickly yellow glow of the street-lights.

“W-well, let me think…It must be five... no, six hundred years.” The medieval minstrel sighed deeply. “I’ve been dead longer than I’ve been alive.  My life is just a distant m-memory now.”

“Och, goodness me!” Morag looked startled. “I didn’t think I’d be hanging around like this forever.  I want to be with my Harold again.” Her thoughts returned to her late husband. “I thought my death would reunite us, but he seems further awa’than ever.  My poor wee hen!”

She shook her head, straightened up, and spoke to herself,“What would Harold say?  He’d say,‘Pull yourself together you daft wee woman,’and he’d be right.”

She looked back at Gibbs.“Six hundred years eh?” She forced a smile,“you’re an expert at being dead then?”

“My dear lady, I don’t know what to say.” Gibbs’sympathetic nods were cut short by some more of his violent convulsions.  When he steadied himself he continued,“I-If I were an expert at being dead I wouldn't be stuck here!”

But Morag had stopped listening.  She was looking up into the dark sky.  Her sorrow and anxiety were once more getting the better of her; she started speaking to herself again,“What does it all mean?”

Gibbs gave a gentle cough,“I-If I may suggest something?” He paused to make sure she was back with him. “I’m guessing that you’ve stayed behind to avenge his exorcism.”