Lets Drink To The Dead Page 5

  Her legs buckled; she clutched at the walls again, but she couldn’t get a grip. And then hands caught her, turned her round. John smirked down at her. Her knife – but before she could put a hand in her jacket pocket he punched her, hard in the solar plexus. Air whooshed out of her; she fought for breath. Pain. Couldn’t fight.

  The cloth was pressed to her face. “Shh,” he whispered.

  A cold surgical smell; the darkness coming down. Masked figures appeared behind John as he let out that high, childish titter.

  Dad, I’m sorry.

  Then black.

  6

  WAKING. A DULL throb in her stomach. Head pounding. The taste of blood in her mouth; the smell of it in her nostrils. Metal digging into her back. Light all around her, bright even through her eyelids. Squinting against it. Trying to move away, but something biting into her ankles and wrists.

  “Ah, you’re once more in the land of the living, if we can so dignify this place. Welcome back, Dani.”

  She opened her eyes. John stood over her, holding the knife.

  “Gideon,” she said. Her voice was a raw, ragged croak, a gallows-bird’s caw. Her head throbbed and spun; she struggled to focus her eyes. Whatever he’d given her was still in her system. “You’re Gideon Dace.”

  He clapped silently. “Just so, my dear.”

  She gritted her teeth. She wanted to scream, cry, beg, but that wouldn’t help. Not with his history. Assuming any of it was the truth. “Aren’t you supposed to be a bit dead?”

  “I told a little white lie, I must admit,” he said. “The part about the fire was true. However, I got out in time. Lost my family home and pretty much all else, but I survived.” He gestured about them. “This was all I had left.”

  Dani looked around. They were in a large, empty room. Candles burned all about them. Christ, what the hell was she lying on? She looked down the length of her body and saw it was a metal bedframe. Like the one she’d dreamt about. Complete with leather restraints at the corners, which were fastened around her wrists and ankles. On the floor around the bed, he’d drawn weird symbols in charcoal. “This?”

  “Ash Fell. The land belonged to my family, remember? I’d managed to win back control of it, but I couldn’t sell it. And after a while, there was no point trying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, come on, Dani. In Ash Fell, you’re never really alone. You can’t stay here, even as briefly as you have, without knowing that.”

  “Yeah,” she said at last.

  “A lot of patients lived and died here over the years. Even the ones who were still alive when the place closed... seem to have left something of themselves behind. And they were... displeased with me. They’ve made my life hell for the last thirty-two years. Ever since I was forced to move in here.”

  Dani felt a smile twist her mouth. “Nowhere else to go, eh?”

  He sighed. “Let’s not make this any more unpleasant than it has to be. It’s not just that. I can’t leave. Oh, I can venture as far as one of the nearby farms to trade something from here – you’d be surprised what odds and ends are still lying around, even now – for bread, milk, eggs, bacon and the like. They wouldn’t want me to die too early, after all. They’d rather prolong my suffering. But they’ve... affected me in some way. I can’t go far from here. Barely make it as far as Kempforth. Otherwise I experience pain, nausea, disorientation. Blinding headaches, vomiting. And they only stop when I come back here. They’ve trapped me, you see. And I’ve found things here. Enough that I could spend my remaining years in some degree of comfort. If I can only get out of here.”

  He took the knife away, tapped it against his chin. “The thing is, you see, it’s becoming quite urgent that I get away.” He turned, paced a little; Dani pulled at the restraints. The one securing her right hand gave, just a little.

  “Age hasn’t been too unkind to me,” Gideon said, “as you can see, but even so I’m hardly young.”

  She looked at her wrist. There was the tiniest crack or split in the leather strap. She pulled at it, glancing from it to Gideon.

  “My days are numbered,” he went on. “And as far as I’m concerned, I’ve suffered enough.” He turned; she stopped pulling at the strap. He looked at her in silence for a moment. Had he seen? But after a moment, he blinked and went on. “You’ll find this hard to believe, I’m sure, but I bear you no malice, Dani. I’m no sadist.”

  “Yeah, right.” She’d seen him in the dream, heard his titter. His jaw clenched for a moment, but then he seemed to relax.

  “All that seems almost like a dream to me now,” he said. “It’s funny to look back and realise that was me. At first... at first, I just genuinely wanted to get back what was mine. Not just mine. The family’s. It was my chance, almost. My father had always considered me a disappointment. Partly because of this–” he tapped his game leg “–but also because of my character. I was somewhat, well, dissipated, was the polite term. Wine, women, song, games of chance. You know the sort of thing.”

  She could hazard a guess.

  Gideon’s eyes lost their focus; he wasn’t seeing her anymore. “Not the sort of thing an officer and a gentleman did. St. John, on the other hand – he was exactly what my father had in mind. But when my father died and we found out what he’d done – that part of it was absolutely true – my brother was utterly at a loss.”

  Dani raised her right hand slowly and pulled on the strap. No sudden moves, just steady pressure.

  “On the other hand, I wasn’t. I knew what it was like to get stabbed in the back. And I knew how to fight battles with guile and wit, rather than with my fists. So I set out to reverse what my father had done to my family.” He smiled; Dani tensed, held her breath, but Gideon kept on gazing into the past. “He would have been furious. At first I just planned to siphon off the money and run the hospital down over a few years. I hated this place. It was a monument to my father’s arrogance and vanity. Destroying it... destroying it was a kind of pleasure in itself.”

  She kept pulling on the strap. She felt something give. Careful. Not too sudden. Get a hand free and you’ve a chance. But only one. Got to catch him by surprise. Time it just right.

  “But the amount of money a place like Ash Fell eats over time has to be seen to be believed. And so I hit on the idea of the tours. And as I went on, thinking of newer and more ways of recouping the money he’d deprived his family of, I lost sight of everything else. And I did terrible things. I admit that.” Gideon blinked; his eyes refocused. Dani let her arm sink back. He looked down at her. “But I’ve paid for what I’ve done, Danielle. It’s been nearly forty years since Ash Fell closed down. Thirty-two of them in here, surrounded by ghosts, tormented night and day. And if I die here, I’ll be trapped in Ash Fell for eternity. And there’ll be no limit to their vengeance then. They can only do so much now, you see, without killing me. When I’m dead, my punishment doesn’t end; it just moves on to another level. And as far as I’m concerned, enough is enough. I’ve paid and paid for my sins.”

  Gideon tugged something out from under his sweater; a medallion of some kind, fastened on a piece of string or cord. There was a symbol on it.

  “I haven’t been idle,” he said. “My father had an interest in the occult. I retained a few of his books. I managed to find this talisman.” He tucked it back inside his sweater. “While I’m wearing this, I’m protected from the worst the dead can do to me. Not completely. I can still see them, and I still can’t leave. But it’s enough. Enough to do this.”

  “What?” How much had she weakened the strap? Enough to break free with her next attempt? She’d only have one chance. She could see a loop of the string poking out of his collar. If she could get to that, get the talisman off him, there might be a chance.

  “There’s a ritual I discovered,” Gideon said. “One that would lift all constraints upon me. I’d be able to leave this and wander freely. Spend the last few years of my life at liberty. And more importantly, avoid being tr
apped here after death. Unfortunately, it requires a sacrifice. I’ve had to wait for a suitable candidate to turn up. And I’m afraid you were the first.”

  “No,” she said. Trying to sound helpless, pleading, scared. Actually, that wasn’t hard. “Please.”

  “As I said,” he told her, “it’s nothing personal. But it won’t be so bad for you. They won’t torment your spirit; they’ve no quarrel with you. And–” he raised the knife high “–it should be quick and painless.”

  His smile was sad. No, he wasn’t enjoying it. But he was going to do it anyway.

  “It might be better if you close your eyes,” he said.

  7

  THE KNIFE WENT up. Now. All or nothing. It all depended on–

  She yanked hard at the restraint, and she felt the leather tear.

  Gideon blinked, looked down, hesitated–

  She yanked again, and the restraint broke. He grabbed at her wrist, but she punched him in the groin. It’d worked before, and it worked again. He doubled up with a yelp, and the knife missed her ear by an inch, plunged down among the springs and stuck there. He yanked at it, clutched at her throat with his free hand.

  Dani got hold of the loose loop of string and pulled. The medallion flopped out into view. She grabbed hold of it, the metal edges digging into her palm, and then yanked.

  Gideon grunted, his head jerking forward as the string refused to break. And then he realised, and he was grabbing at her hand. “No. You bitch. No.” The knife rose again.

  She spat in his eyes; he flinched, stumbling back, and her hand twisted from his grip. She yanked again, and the string broke.

  Gideon shouted, lunged at her with the knife–

  And suddenly someone was standing between them. Someone in an army uniform.

  “No,” said a voice.

  The room was getting darker; looking around, Dani could see the candles were flickering out. The dark beyond the dwindling light was moving, the shadows shifting and forming shapes. She looked away from them; she knew what they’d look like.

  “Get out of my way, St. John,” Gideon said. He tried to dodge past the newcomer to reach her, trying to snatch the talisman from her hand. She pulled her hand back, folded it to her chest. More candles flickered out. Dark shapes advanced.

  St. John Dace stepped towards Gideon. Dani could see a huge, gaping wound in the back of his head. “No, Gideon.”

  “I’ve paid the price!” Gideon shouted. “I’ve paid!”

  “No.”

  The candles went out. The room was dark. Shuffling figures in uniforms and smocks moved past.

  “I’ve paid, I tell you.”

  “That’s not for you to decide.”

  “Get back. Get back.” Then that high, manic titter. “You can’t hurt me. You can’t. You’re just ghosts. I can still kill her and–”

  “We can’t,” said St. John. “But there are other things here. Old things that have slept and waited. Things that can hurt you. Things like this.”

  The room, already cold, suddenly grew even colder. The dead moved back, some of them pressed almost up against the bedframe. There was a scratching, scraping sound, and between the closely-packed forms, Dani saw something move past; something very, very tall and thin, impossibly thin for a human being, surely. Something whose shape was thankfully hidden under a black, tattered cloak and cowl; something with long, long skeletal fingers that groped out ahead of it.

  “No. No.” There was something beyond rage and misery in Gideon’s voice now; there was naked terror.

  “You know what it is,” said St. John Dace. “And you know what will happen if it touches you.”

  The black, tattered thing advanced; Dani glimpsed Gideon’s face – white, mouth agape, eyes staring – as he retreated, out of the doorway, onto the landing. The tattered thing pursued him; the dead crowded after it. Only St. John Dace remained in the room, watching them go.

  There was a scream from Gideon, then a splintering sound, a crash, and another scream; one that faded, receding, and ending in a wet crunch of impact. Then silence.

  St. John turned and looked down at her. Blood ran from his eyes. “Sleep,” he said, and a cold hand rested on her brow. And then there was nothing.

  8

  MORNING WOKE HER; thin pale light stinging her eyes through the room’s window, and the faint twitter of birdsong outside.

  Dani opened her eyes. Her head pounded. She sat up; the pain washed outwards to fill her whole body. Her stomach seemed to slop about inside her like a bucket almost full to overflowing. She put a hand over her mouth; the nausea subsided. She was still holding the talisman; its edges had dug into her palm and drawn blood.

  She was free, she realised. The other restraints had all been neatly unfastened. Her rucksack sat beside the bed. She opened it quickly; everything was packed.

  She made her way outside. To her right was a staircase. The banister had broken. She peered over; the stairwell circled downwards over three floors, presumably to ground level. Below her lay a small broken figure, like a discarded doll.

  She went down the staircase, emerged at the bottom. Gideon’s body was twisted awkwardly in the middle, bent at an angle she wouldn’t have believed possible. Steam rose from his bloodied mouth; breath. Still alive, at least for now. His eyes flickered towards her, mutely pleading.

  She pulled her rucksack back on, stepped over him and went out.

  SHE DESCENDED THE path back towards the abandoned station, breathing in the cold clear morning air. Her headache faded; the nausea passed.

  This time there was no ambiguity about what might or might not be there. The trees on either side of the path were lined with smocked and uniformed figures; each, as she passed them, raised a finger to their lips, or to where their lips had been.

  She nodded, again and again, as she passed. She’d keep her silence on this. Who’d believe a tale like hers in any case? Besides, the little she’d glimpsed of that tattered, spindly thing had been more than enough. It’d haunt her dreams as it was; if she angered the dead by disobeying them, it might do more than that.

  For now, she only wanted to get away from here and find her way back to Dunwich Road; everything else, even deciding whether she went on to Manchester or back to her family, could wait.

  As she neared the entrance to the platform, a figure stepped out. Military uniform, neatly pressed, and his eyes no longer bled.

  St. John Dace touched his finger to his lips.

  “I will,” she said.

  He smiled, and touched his finger to the brim of his cap, in salute. And then she blinked and he was gone.

  Dani looked back up the path, and it was empty. The wind rustled in the trees, and a bird twittered somewhere. Otherwise, there was nothing.

  She stood like that for a long time, before she finally turned and walked away.

  HOW BRIEFLY DEAD CHILDREN DREAM

  Human life is not so much sleep

  As that part of sleep in which we dream

  What a tiny fragment of being

  In the black sleepless night before, after

  And how briefly dead children dream...

  Bolesław Taborski, 1927-2010

  1

  FIVE DAYS FROM Christmas and Myfanwy’s awake, in the cold iron dark of the night. She blinks and sees her breath in the air. It shouldn’t be that cold; she put the heating on, and there’s no-one else here to switch it off. She’s been alone a long time.

  But she is not alone tonight.

  Myfanwy.

  She doesn’t hear her name so much as see it, printed on the black night air. She realises she can’t hear the bedside clock ticking. She looks and sees the second hand inching steadily around the clockface. But there’s no sound.

  Myfanwy.

  Slowly, she raises her head and looks down to the foot of the bed.

  The figure is silhouetted. A young man. A cold, flickery light, like a bitter white flame, barely illuminates his face.

  There’s a plac
e you need to go, he says. The old farmhouse on Dunwich Lane. Go there. Now.

  The cold light blinks out and the young man is gone. Myfanwy sees her white breath in the air, hears the clock’s tick again, feels warmth return, but the chill stays deep in her bones. When you’re seventy-five, cold lingers and is hard to shift.

  She closes her eyes, lets out a long breath and turns the cover back.

  It has just turned midnight. December 20th , 1986, has passed into history. It’s now the first hour of December 21st: Midwinter’s Eve.

  2

  MYFANWY DRESSED AND went downstairs. It took her a few minutes; the cold still wasn’t leaving her bones. At her age, everything took longer to recover from.

  She put the kettle on the hob, spooned coffee into a mug, added a dash of milk. Took a Benson’s from the packet and lit it. Her son was always on at her to give up. She was trying as well. Her grandchildren were the light of her life, especially little Anna. But it was a hard habit to break, after so many years. Especially on a night like this.

  The kettle shrilled. She stubbed her cigarette out half-smoked and made her coffee, sipped. She didn’t want to look up; the air of the kitchen seemed to tremble in the pale cold overhead light like the desert in a heat haze, as if it might shift into a shadowy figure, one she might see better this time.

  “Alright,” she said. Her voice, always throaty, sounded like a croak to her own ears. “I’m going. Just let me get this down me first. I’m not as young as I was. Need warming up.”

  Go there. Now. That’s what the young man had said. It’d been a long time since the Sight had done anything for Myfanwy. Once or twice over the years there’d been a twinge, a feeling, but little else. She’d thought it dead, gone. But clearly not. And she knew – from bitter experience – not to ignore it. But first she needed warming; half-frozen, she’d be no good to anyone at her age.