walking on exposed but stained and highly varnished floorboards.
But now there was something wrong with it. Now it seemed to have come alive. Now the carpet had turned nasty.
Although preoccupied right then, Moker had nevertheless become distracted by the phenomenon, because the radiating carpet strands had nearly unbalanced him and, still astonished, I realized the fibres must be as hard as nails. Andrea’s unconscious body, which lay in the other half of the room close to the fireplace, suddenly stirred as a thousand or so stiffened fibres straightened under her body, lifting her slightly. She tried to raise her head, blood from her busted nose spoiling the carpet, but the effort was too much and she slumped down again, a short muffled cry escaping as fibres pricked her cheek.
Moker was still fascinated by the carpet’s movement, a kind of shiny wildness in those black eyes of his, his victim held aloft but forgotten for the moment. The distraction had also briefly diverted me.
The closed curtains began to wave as if caught in a breeze, even though the windows behind them were shut. A delicate figurine that sat near the centre of the long sideboard suddenly streaked across the room to smash against the white-brick fire surround. Moker stared at the myriad pieces as if expecting the little statue to put itself together again. There were hefty, tall, white-marble candlestick holders on each end of the sideboard and one began to wobble on the flat surface. The agitation caused a rumbling sound before the ornament slowly rose into the air, the candle it held tilting, then falling back onto the sideboard. The marble holder hovered at about head height as we watched and then, without warning, it shot down the room towards us.
Out of instinct, I ducked, but Moker’s reactions were not so fast. The heavy object struck full in his disfigured face. A rough, snuffling cry escaped him and he dropped Primrose onto the bristling carpet. I fell to my knees beside her and quickly examined her face. The redness had gone from it, but a bluish tinge had crept into her new pallor, another serious warning that an asthma attack was under way. The rise and fall of her chest was shallow, but I was pleased to see at least breath vapour leaking from behind her lips, which meant she was breathing. Wait a minute! Breath vapour? What was that all about?
No sooner had I asked myself the question than I felt the chill.
In my state of spirit, the room’s temperature should have been of no consequence. Yet I had become cold, a deep frigidity seeping through my non-existent bones, filling my interior, chilling my blood, cooling organs that I no longer possessed, freezing me! I felt the hairs on my forearms prickle—God, I felt the hair on my head stiffen! And when I looked across the room at Moker, who was leaning against a wall holding his forehead, I saw frost in his sparse lank strands of hair and billows of steam escaping the hole in his face.
It seemed that he, too, was now aware of the room’s iciness, because he slowly straightened, taking his hand away from his head (I was disappointed to see that the missile had not broken the skin—there was no blood —although he was marked and likely to have a very nasty bruise there), and this time he scanned the whole room. Now I thought there was a glint of fear in those killer eyes.
Andrea was still not moving at all. Was she unconscious or dead? Small amounts of white frost speckled her hair also, hair that seemed full of static.
What the hell was going on?
A colour photograph—Andrea, Prim and myself, Prim just three years old and smiling deliciously, taken when on holiday in Naples, not in Italy but on the Gulf of Mexico—heavily weighted by its silver frame, flew off the mantelpiece and thudded into Moker’s back, so he swung around again.
An elegant but empty vase that sat solo on a tall stand beside the front window hurled itself across the room and smashed against Moker’s kneecap, inducing a grunt of pain from him.
The recessed ceiling lights suddenly oscillated between bright and low, then back again, as if some unseen hand was manipulating their dimmer control, the change becoming quicker as the sequence continued to repeat itself. But this weak strobing effect had nothing to do with their control switch, because the independent glows from two lamps at either end of the room, one floor-standing, the other, smaller, lamp on the sideboard, were following the ceiling lights’ behaviour.
A large black-framed painting—a limited edition Rothko print, three unequal slabs of colour piled one on top of the other—dropped to the floor with a crash, landing upright, the glass cracking from top to bottom with only a few jagged shards breaking free, before the whole thing toppled face-forward onto the petrified (literally) carpet.
Moker looked around him as if stupefied and clouds of vapour billowed from his funnelled face.
Once again I became conscious of the coldness: it was as if a huge icy hand had gripped me inside, its fingers now curling round my heart. Even though I didn’t exist in the physical sense, I felt my limbs stiffen, my back and neck freeze up. The door to the lounge slammed shut, the sound like a shot from a cannon, making me jump; it flew open again and there was no one outside in the hall to have pulled it. The door slammed shut once more, the sound shattering, its crash causing the remaining paintings around the room to fall. This time the door rebounded off its frame, then casually swung open. One of the paintings covered by non-reflective glass had landed face-up about a yard away from me and I noticed the glass surface was completely frosted over, the picture beneath a vague pattern of faded pastel colours. Further along the lounge the fireplace implements clattered into the hearth and seemed to vibrate there, as though trying to levitate. A straight-backed chair near the coffee table toppled over as the silent whirlwind ruffled curtains and either moved books and magazines or riffled their pages. The lights, which for a while had remained constantly low, dimmed even further and it was as if the night outside had broken in.
More objects—CDs rattling in their rack, other framed photographs, a long-handled pewter candle snuffer, small but valued ornaments collected over the years, those same disturbed books and magazines—all swept across the room to hurl themselves at the bewildered and, I hoped, frightened killer, who could only gape at the maelstrom as the missiles bounced off him.
It was then that the shapes began to emerge from the darkness.
Blurred phantasms at first, that was all. Elements that did not quite hang together filtering through the dusk. Discarnate conformations, shades that as yet had no definition. All in motion, weaving as if in some exotic but ethereal dance as they assembled themselves.
Ghosts.
A kind of snorting gasp came from Moker, and his black eyes were fixed on the flittering haze that was closer to me than him. Even without a face, his body language alone revealed his alarm: he trembled violently as he cowered against a wall and the hands he held high to shield himself from further projectiles shook as if he were several stages into Parkinson’s disease. His heavy eyebrows were crusted with ice crystals and hanging strands of his hair looked brittle enough to snap. I thanked God that the lunatic had forgotten about Primrose.
The swirling mists rolled like fog in his direction, configurations within constantly resolving themselves only to fade again and lose distinction from the mass. But I was sure that I recognized one chimera among the many as the grey mutable shroud purled past me, a ghost that had haunted me long ago, as well as more recently. It was my father and I sensed beyond doubt that he was here with these other ghosts to help me. How was that possible? I had no answer right then, because I didn’t even know how I was possible.
When the now boiling mass crowded in on Moker he tried to beat them off with his hands, but because they had no genuine substance, his efforts were worthless. The mists hardly stirred under his frenzied swipes, although they continued to create shadowy forms within, all of them ambiguous, no single entity dominating the others. There seemed to be a horde of them as they enveloped Moker.
Although they appeared to fall on him with vigour, ultimately they were no more effective than Moker himself was in warding them off. Sure, they tugged at his long raincoat, stabbed spectral fingers at his face, but they had no power to inflict injury,* save for hurling various inanimate bits and pieces at him and even then, that stuff appeared to have no real force behind it. No, it was sheer terror that drove Moker to his knees.
*Remember this: GHOSTS CANNOT PHYSICALLY HARM LIVING PEOPLE. Okay, they can cause insensate objects to fly across rooms but those same objects will not even scratch their target; ghosts can make heavy furniture move, cause teacups and windows to rattle even will some things to levitate, BUT THEY CANNOT PHYSICALLY HARM ANY LIVING PERSON. Of course, they can scare you to death, induce heart failure, even send you insane with fear by their haunting, BUT THEY CANNOT PHYSICALLY HARM YOU. Try not to forget it.
For a short while the unearthly manifestations grew stronger, although none became solid as they engulfed the serial killer. Gratified, perhaps cruelly so, I sought out individual faces and diaphanous but clearer figures among the spectral host, none of which I recognized, save for the one who had been my absent father in the physical
