The Secrets of Ghosts (24 page)

Henry nodded. ‘And the ones who can talk. What are they like?’

Katie thought about Violet. ‘Variable.’

Henry turned away from the pond and moved a little closer to Katie. She felt a wave of cold air, as if an enormous cloud had gone across the blazing sun.

‘Have you met any others? Ghosts?’

‘No.’ Henry looked irritated. ‘I told you, I can’t leave this place.’

‘But, there are others here. Lots, probably. I mean, this place is old.’

Henry was very still. ‘There are other lost souls here?’

‘You’ve never seen another ghost?’ Katie realised how little she knew about her new reality. ‘Aren’t you guys all connected on, like, a spiritual plane or something?’

‘I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m not.’ Henry looked miserable. ‘I told you, I haven’t conversed with anyone for a very long time.’

‘Perhaps you’re all on different planes.’

‘In soap bubbles, floating around you.’ Henry smiled. ‘You’re at our centre, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t think I’m important. I’m just the lucky girl who can see ghosts.’

‘There must be a reason. I can feel the power coming from you.’ Henry took a deep breath. ‘Can’t you see how I get stronger when you’re near?’

It was true: he did seem more solid again. ‘You think I’m doing that?’

‘I think you’ve no idea what you can do.’

‘My aunt, Gwen, she finds lost things and she’s really good at making remedies, giving advice, that kind of thing. The women in my family often have special skills. I think there was even someone who could talk to the dead, kind of, but nothing like this, nothing like...’

‘Nothing like you.’ Henry smiled. ‘Why does that not surprise me?’

‘I just wish I knew why. I mean, the gifts in our family are usually useful in some way. I tried to speak to a ghost, to help him, and I couldn’t. He looks miserable and I can’t help. What’s the point of that?’

‘I wonder why you can talk to some spirits and not others.’ Henry tilted his head back as if to appraise Katie more fully. ‘Perhaps you’re not really trying.’

‘I did try,’ Katie said. ‘He just didn’t hear me.’

‘Perhaps you need a physical connection. This ghost you say you tried to help, did you touch him?’

Katie shook her head. ‘Something told me not to.’

‘Your selfishness, perhaps.’

‘Hey.’

Henry lowered his eyes. ‘You felt frightened, yes? The little voice that lives in the back of our minds and tells us when to run, when to hide, it spoke to you, yes? And you listened because that was easier than helping this poor unfortunate.’

‘That’s not true,’ Katie said and wished she couldn’t feel the tugging in her left ear lobe. She had been frightened. She was frightened, now.

‘I think you need to reach into him,’ Henry reached his own hands out and Katie took an instinctive step backwards.

‘What do you mean ‘into’?’

‘I’m working on a theory,’ Henry said. ‘I think you need to connect, to join your physical forms.’

‘I don’t want to,’ Katie said. Apart from anything else, it was starting to sound dodgily sexual.

Henry shrugged. ‘It all depends how much you want to help him.’

Katie felt sick. She didn’t want to touch the ghost, didn’t want to be anywhere near him when he produced that horrible sharp blade and began cutting.

Chapter 18

Katie needed to get away. She needed a break from the hotel, from Violet and from Max. He wasn’t entirely wrong when he said she didn’t want to get too close. She didn’t like feeling attracted to him. It made her feel weak and vulnerable. As if she could do something stupid at any moment. It was all very well for Anna to say she should ‘live a little’, but she didn’t know how seriously wrong that could go. Trust the wrong person and you could wind up dead. That was Katie’s reality and all the fridge-magnet homilies in the world couldn’t change it.

The streets were busy and Katie dodged window shoppers and dawdling couples. The bridge was choked with tourists. Some were leaning over the parapet and gawping at the water as if they’d never seen a river before. Katie blamed the weather. The sun was low in the sky, casting a yellow-toned glow onto the scenery, and the air was warm and still. It made the place feel Mediterranean and holiday-ish.

As she stepped around a couple of girls who had stopped in the middle of the pavement to snap pictures with their mobiles Katie felt a rush of cold air. Before she had time to process the familiar feeling, a man who was too translucent to be alive reared up in front of her. ‘Have you seen it?’ His voice was a quiet rasp and Katie took an instinctive step backwards.

Katie opened her mouth to reply and, remembering that she was surrounded by people, closed it again. She shook her head as discreetly as possible, lowered her eyes and moved on.

Katie’s flat was on the middle floor of a town house. One of the Victorian ones on Elm Road, and something the people of Pendleford had an irritating habit of referring to as the ‘new houses’. Just because Pendleford had houses and streets from medieval times and had originally been a Roman settlement, didn’t mean they had to shout about it. And it certainly didn’t mean they should get away with referring to Victorian as ‘new’.

The streets were quieter once she was off the main road, but the whispering voices she’d started to hear seemed to get louder in response. It was like having a receiver in her mind, constantly flicking between radio stations with varying receptions. Maddening.

When Shari had lived in the flat, Katie had developed a habit of walking into the living room with her eyes aimed on the carpet. That way, if Shari and her boyfriend were engaged in naked sofa gymnastics, they had time to disentangle or, at least, pull a throw over themselves.

At first, Katie had loved being able to walk anywhere in the flat, her gaze held high and without fear of seeing a stray boob or random penis, but today it didn’t seem like such a terrible price to pay for company. She unlocked the front door and walked into the quiet hallway, ignoring the wisp of a ghost that she could sense around knee height. She didn’t look down. The child ghosts were the worst. They looked so forlorn, so empty. Yesterday, she’d seen a boy of about eighteen months crawling along the aisle of the local supermarket. He’d been dressed in layers of woollen clothes, which made him look like a bulky sort of caterpillar, and he’d been crying so hard that there were trails of snot and tears hanging from his face to the floor. She’d had to leave her basket of shopping on the floor and still couldn’t think about his unhappy face without crying, herself.

In the bathroom, she clicked on the light, illuminating the cracked white tiles above the sink and the black mould that was advancing across the ceiling. The room was freezing, as always, and the creaky extractor fan wheezed into life. Katie contemplated the black mould that had colonised the sealant about the sink and had turned the tile grouting a speckled grey. It was comforting to think about normal things like bleaching the walls and how she needed to phone her landlord about the dodgy noises coming from the boiler.

Katie squeezed toothpaste onto her brush and ran the cold tap, turning it all the way on just to get a measly trickle of water. That was the only thing with the characterful old properties in Pendleford: they were high maintenance and she wasn’t exactly the housekeeping type.

The overhead light flickered and the extractor fan stopped working. She began brushing her teeth, closing her eyes against the light in case it started a migraine.

When she opened them, leaning forward to spit, she caught sight of a figure. An old man with a heavily lined face and big pouched bags under his eyes. She yelled, a fountain of toothpaste foam and saliva pouring down her chin. The light flashed off and then on again in a split second and there was nobody there.

Katie looked around the bathroom, shaking so badly her teeth were cracking together. The room was colder still, the hairs on her arms standing upright. This was another problem with the old houses in Pendleford. Lots of ghosts.

*

Katie walked to Pendleford green on her own. Gwen had told her to trust her instincts and she had to do something about controlling her power. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was supposed to help the spirits and she was determined to work out how to do that on her own. Besides, she didn’t want to bother Gwen with this ghost business unless she had to. Katie couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong with Gwen. She was draped in a sadness and Katie didn’t know where it had come from or why it had descended now. Maybe Gwen was working too hard? Maybe the attention for her shadow boxes was more stressful than everyone realised.

Katie had a plan, though. She was taking control and going to work things out on her own. She had brought a blanket to sit on and a book to read, but she couldn’t concentrate. She kept watching the players, waiting for the boy to show up. She was half in hope and half in dread and her eyes danced over the page, turning the text to gibberish. After a while, she gave up on her book and just watched the match. There was something hypnotic about the thwack of the ball on the willow bat and she found herself being drawn into the game. So much so that when the boy appeared it took her a second to recognise him. Katie had wondered if her new knowledge would make him appear differently, but he was just as solid-looking as before.

She’d seated herself conveniently close to the pavilion and was able to slip inside ahead of him. She went into the changing room, crossing fingers that it was unoccupied. It was.

Katie didn’t have long to wait; the boy appeared in the middle of the room, between the benches. He was looking straight ahead, unseeing, and his walk had that odd flowing quality she’d got used to seeing.

‘Hello,’ she said as loudly as she could. The boy didn’t show any sign of having heard and Katie proceeded with the next part of her plan. She followed the boy into the shower but before he could reach the corner, turn around and do away with himself, she darted into the corner ahead of him and plunged her hands straight into his chest. She willed herself to believe that her hands would sink inside him and, just as Henry had claimed, they sank into the boy as if he were vapour. Which he was. Unbelievably solid-looking vapour. Katie could feel more than vapour. Nothing solid and certainly not what she would be feeling had she put her hands inside an actual corpse, but something with substance. A squishy sensation, pressure around her hands and fingers. Something. Katie tamped down on the urge to throw up and said, ‘I’m here to help you.’

The boy’s eyes grew wide in surprise. He opened and closed his mouth like a guppy.

‘I can help,’ Katie said. ‘You need to let go. There’s nothing here for you now. If you let go of this place, you can move on.’

The boy looked anguished but Katie had no idea if he was overcome with emotion at being spoken to for the first time in goodness knew how long or whether having her hands inside his ghostly body was as unpleasant for him as it was for her.

‘You need to move on,’ she said. Then, feeling rather self-conscious, she said, ‘I release you from this mortal plane.’

The boy seemed to be getting more solid than before. The sensation around Katie’s hands was getting more pronounced; she could imagine tissue and muscle and blood pressing around and between her fingers. The boy’s expression was getting more frightened, his face splitting into a scream.

Katie pulled her hands away and the boy disappeared.

Katie washed her hands and then ran cold water over her wrists until she felt less sick. She walked into the sunshine and tried to feel triumphant. Katie tried to convince herself that something good had happened, that she’d released him from torment, but her gut told her otherwise. She ran back inside and just made it to the sink before throwing up.

Chapter 19

On her way home, Anna called, sounding excited. ‘I’m going to look at a flat. Can you meet me?’

Katie stopped walking and sat on a bench to wait for Anna. She was delighted to have a distraction, a reason not to think about the boy in the cricket pavilion or Violet or her nightmares or any of it. At least for a little while.

‘I’m sick of travelling from Bath every day,’ Anna said, when she arrived. ‘I want to walk into work. There’s a new development down from the old mill.’

‘By the river? I bet that’s expensive.’

‘Too much on my own, but it’s two bedrooms.’ Anna shrugged. ‘I was hoping you’d come and look at it with me. You know, if you want.’

‘I want,’ Katie said. She took the particulars from Anna and checked the rent. It was practically the same as her current place. ‘Why is it so cheap?’

Anna looked at her. ‘You think that’s cheap?’

‘Well, nothing around here is cheap, but you know—’

Anna shook her head. ‘I forget you’re rich.’

‘I’m not rich,’ Katie said.

‘Your family is, though. It makes a difference. You know you’ve got a safety cushion, whatever happens.’ Anna spoke without rancour, but it still stung.

‘I pay my own way.’

‘I’m not having a go,’ Anna said. ‘I’m jealous.’

‘But I don’t take money from my dad.’

‘I’m not saying that you do. Just that if it all goes tits up, you know he’ll bail you out. It’s security.’

‘That’s not—’

‘When your car needed a new clutch last month, who paid for it?’

‘That’s different. I need a car and there’s a service-agreement thingy with the garage—’

‘Which your dad bought. When he bought the car.’

Katie forced a smile. ‘You might have a point.’

‘Now, take me.’ Anna pointed to her chest. ‘I can’t afford a car not because I can’t buy one, but because I know I don’t have the income to fix it when it goes wrong or needs a service or whatever. I want to start a business but I don’t have the capital and no bank will lend me the money so I’m stuck working for Patrick Allen. For now, at least.’

There was an awkward pause. Then Katie said, ‘We could always rob a bank.’ She offered Anna the bottle of water.

‘It’s good to keep our options open,’ Anna said. ‘It’s a shame you can’t magic up some cash. That would be handy.’