Stories for Chip (39 page)

The baseline sensor was located outside the building, collecting data they could use to compare the electromagnetic fields inside and outside. Tomorrow she and Dan would go through the data, looking for anomalies. If they found anything they'd go to step 2: interview the people who'd responded to Dan's survey stating that they'd had supernatural experiences at this site. The ballroom was supposed to be the hotspot. She glanced around. It was large, the full width of the building, with three bay windows looking out into an enclosed courtyard, and three looking toward the road that led through the woods up to the main entrance. The windows were reduced to U-shaped openings in the brickwork, but in places the walls were still ten feet high. A decayed sofa lay on its side in the middle of the room, mahogany legs helplessly in the air like a great dead insect. The shadow it cast behind it in the hard light from the spots was even more insectile. Megan closed her eyes and tried to imagine the room as it must have been once. Bright and airy. Rather grand. She couldn't make it happy, somehow, but certainly bright.

“Why did they close this place down?”

Dan turned to face her, smiled and waved a finger.

“How long have we been doing this? You know you don't get the juice on the hospice until tomorrow.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

It was always the same story anyway. She didn't know why he was so coy about it; she could have googled the place if she'd really wanted to know, and it would be some variation on the usual themes: unseen children crying in empty rooms, headless monks walking through walls, or women in white, killed whilst attempting to rendezvous with a forbidden lover. Still trying to make that meeting, failing for all eternity. Then there were the friendly ones, killed in disasters and for some reason bound to the spot trying to avert future accidents. She liked those stories better. Well, perhaps the sensor readings would show something in the morning and they'd be able to put the hotel's ghosts to rest. Just naturally occurring electromagnetic fields, making mojo with your brain.

“I sometimes wish I didn't know the science,” she said, pulling her tobacco pouch from her pocket and rolling up.

“You've got to be kidding,” said Dan, finally leaving off tweaking the sensors and sitting back down, long legs stretched in front of him. “You want to be scared shitless by random phenomena every time you walk past an iron deposit or an overhead cable? Don't you have enough trouble sleeping as it is?”

She looked at him. Half his face was in shadow, half in the light; bright light and deep shadow like the face of the moon. Laughter lines were just beginning to crease the corners of his eyes. Her stomach turned over with desire. So long she'd yearned for him, sitting this close, closer, if she reached out she could touch his face, but then again she couldn't. Yes, she longed for more tangible strangeness in her life. For something to actually
happen
, instead of all this pointless longing. As a child she'd populated her world with imaginary friends and fantastic beasts. Dryads in every tree, naiads in every pond. Too much reading, too much time spent mooning around on her own. Two years into a degree in psychology, she'd had most of the credulity educated out of her, but she liked the idea of a world with magic in it. Dan was a postgrad, and he didn't believe in
anything
inexplicable.

She tapped the end of her roll-up against her knee.

“You make it sound so prosaic. But you know, maybe there is something there, too. We don't know yet.” She lit her cigarette and inhaled, blowing a smoke ring out into the glare of the light. “All the factors have not been eliminated.”

“They will be,” said Dan.

“Many studies have carried out detailed surveys of such locations and revealed potential contributing influences from (1) contextual and situational specific factors, (2) diverse lighting levels, (3) drafts, (4) infrasound levels, (5) the localized distribution and changes in geomagnetic fields (GMFs), (6) time-varying electromagnetic fields (EMFs), and (7) transient tectonic events, to name but a few. All of these factors, either collectively or individually, could either induce a direct experience or facilitate an experience-prone state in certain observers and under certain circumstances.”

Megan clawed toward consciousness with desperation and regret. Sharks had chased her through murky waters following the scent of blood; this she knew although she wasn't injured. When she'd reached the surface and walked out onto the dusty beach, she'd turned to see the Earth hanging in the sky, big and round and beautiful and impossibly far away. There was a terrible pain in her lower back and she turned to find a tiny shark, its jaws locked around her spine. She turned and tried to grasp its slippery body. The sense of dread she felt seemed disproportionate to the circumstances, and when she came to herself, pain wracking her sacrum where she'd slumped awkwardly in her chair, the dread didn't pass. It was always the bloody sharks, even though she could watch
Jaws
all the way through now with barely a twitch of fear. You never shook off the six-year-old inside.

“Dan,” she said, feeling as if she was still underwater. She couldn't hear her own voice. “Dan,” she tried again. “What did you mean, hospice? I thought this was a hotel?” Although her pulse was racing as if she'd just run a mile uphill, when she turned her head to look at him, it was the motion of rock grinding against rock. He was sitting at the laptop, his back to her. He hadn't heard. She tried to lift her hand, but it stayed resolutely still, resting on her knee. The other was the same. The left foot, the right foot; nothing was shifting. She felt her breath start to quicken and her chest constrict.
It's OK,
she told herself.
Sleep paralysis. Night terrors. Happens to people all the time.

She knew all about sleep events. They explained a lot of haunt-type experiences. Knowing about something didn't make you immune to it, though. She closed her eyes and sent a message to whoever might be listening.
When I said I wanted something to happen I didn't mean a crappy old night terror. This isn't any fun at all.
Her breathing was still accelerating. She fought to regain control.
Nothing to fear. You'll fall asleep again soon. Won't even remember it in the morning.
She imagined herself at eight years old, with her mother's arms around her, the old yellow blanket that always made her feel safe. She could almost smell it, but her heart still beat in her throat. The dread pooling in her stomach writhed and split into two and her awareness doubled: déjà vu. Had she been suffering from night terrors all along and just not remembered it? Was this a cycle?

She reached out to Dan with her frantic mind, begging him to turn around, please, please turn around and see that her eyes were open, and come over and wake her, take her in his arms and stroke her hair and make everything all right. He didn't turn. Figures rolled across the laptop screen. In the blue light it cast, his hands quested across the keyboard, pale and unearthly like the albino lobster she'd once seen in a restaurant aquarium.

A clattering, scrambling sound echoed in the corridor outside the room.

In the corner of her eye she could see a blue-green glow quite like to the one coming from the screen, creeping misty through the empty doorframe and onto the parquet. An eternity of arrhythmic heartbeats and the battle for control of her rigid neck muscles brought Megan's head around. The sounds stopped as the creature came to a halt in front of her. Silhouettes stretching in two directions were rendered faint by the creature's own ethereal glimmer. It dropped its silver horn to the ground, flashed one eye at her, and spoke.

This shouldn't be. Paralysis yes, a sense of dread, sure, auditory hallucinations, maybe. Something sinister in the room. The hag on your chest, the succubus stealing your breath. Not this. Not the complexity of dreams, not talking fantasies, not…for fuck's sake. Unicorns.
Breathe
.

“Megan?”

Not a voice so much as an increase in the pressure in her chest, a prickling at the back of her neck. Still the snakes twisting in her gut. Still the déjà vu, never gone on this long, and she knew, knew for sure, that this could not have happened before.

“Aren't you pleased to see me?”

Her eyes were watering. She choked, fought to swallow. The beast took a step toward her, and she could see that tears rolled from its eyes, too. She tried to cringe away from it. It stepped forward again, and she could smell its breath. Like summer afternoons. Its hoofs were silver, its coat was white and its mane and tail were lavender. A memory caught her, pulled her back twelve years, to an attic room, a yellow blanket on a high bed beneath an open window. Her collection of toy unicorns arrayed in front of her. Larha, her favorite. Porcelain, fragile, smooth beneath her hands, a gift from her grandmother, not one to be played with.

“Here I am, Megan. Won't you stroke my neck?” It turned its head, presenting shimmering inches of silver fur. Something glistened gray, attached to its head just below the ear. Whatever it was, she couldn't look at it.

“Wrong,” she whispered.
This is wrong.

It turned to look at her again, and its tears were thickening, darkening, leaving dirty streaks on its face. “She kept me safe for sixty years. You had me for six. Unicorns can't fly, Megan, didn't you know?”

She'd known. Fly, she'd told the little china thing, fly to Granny. Shattered pieces on the patio. Her mother crying. Her mother, crying.
Granny was my mum, Megan. I miss her just like you'd miss me if I had to go away and not come back.

The unicorn's tears were taking off the fur where they passed.

“I'm sorry.” She wanted to cry, but terror was stronger. She wanted to reach out and comfort Larha, but still she couldn't move. She wanted to leap from her chair and run, drive through the night to her parents' house in Clapham, hurl herself onto her mother's bed. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. And—don't leave me.

The tears were cutting furrows in his skin. Scarlet mixed with the black droplets and dripped onto the floor.

“Dies,” he said, kneeling on the ground and laying his chin on the ground. “Everything dies. Why did you let go of me?”

Larha collapsed onto his side. A collection of broken bits laid on a blue silk scarf. Her mother, her hands still supple, folding the cloth over. Wordlessly putting the bundle away in a drawer in the sideboard. She turned toward Megan and stepped through the cone of light shining on the active sensor. Her hair was long and loose, and she wore a brown cotton dress that left her tanned arms bare.

Megan still couldn't breathe properly. She felt her eyes trying to roll up into her skull, and yet could not draw them away from the impossible vision of her mother walking gracefully toward her.

“Megan?”

“Mum?”

“Hello, muffin,” she said, smiling and bending down so her face was close to Megan's. She smelled of shampoo and Chanel 19. “I hear you're still having trouble sleeping. Do you want me to tell you a story?”

Suddenly Megan felt terribly tired. The fight went out of her limbs, and they no longer felt trapped and rigid, but heavy and useless.

“Once upon a time,” said her mother, seating herself on the floor, “there was a beautiful princess.”

“Is the story about me?” Megan whispered without meaning to.

Her mother hesitated, and frowned. “It was always about you, wasn't it? My youth, devoted to your happiness. You and your father.” The frown became a scowl. Looking up at Megan, she drew back her lips and bared her teeth. They were tiny arrowheads set into her gums, a row of chipped flints she flicked her tongue across. “Everything you touched you broke. And you abandoned me here! Tied up and forgotten! A hundred years of isolation. A
hundred
aching years.” She moaned. “Chaos. Terror. You don't understand Megan, you'll never understand.”

It was true. She didn't understand, had always shied away from understanding. She woke in the night with fragments of understanding scurrying away from her conscious mind like cockroaches from the light.

Her mother lay back on the floor. Her moans became shrieks of pain and fear. Megan had the idea that if she tried to move, she'd be able to now, could go to her mother's side and help her. But she couldn't try. Her face was still wet with tears, but the flow had stopped and she longed to be able to cry again.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I didn't mean to break him. I didn't know what would happen.”

Hands bunched and released the fabric of the cotton dress that now clung to her mother's skin, sweat-soaked. Something squirmed beneath the fabric. Her legs began to thrash, then spread wide and, from beneath that chocolate-colored canopy across her knees, the something emerged. Through bloody mucus she could see gray flesh, slick and alien. Like the leech-thing on Larha's white neck, only bigger. It fought free of the placenta and uncurled; a head, a body. Fins. Tail. Teeth. Her mother still sobbed. As the shark-baby moved up her body, another came, and another. Four sharks swam over her, and where they passed her skin sagged. Muscle melted away leaving bone and sinew. They traveled along her limbs and positioned themselves at her joints, opened tooth-filled jaws and bit down. At the ankles, wrists, knees, elbows, her mother was divided. There was no blood.

When they bit into her throat, the screaming stopped.

The sharks swam away into shadow, but their presence filled the room. The body on the floor was a pile of broken bits.
I didn't mean to let you go.

The lassitude still wrapped her mind and body in poison, but she found she no longer minded not being able to breathe. The pain, the paralysis, even the fear; she understood that they were deserved. She was exhausted, though.

She blinked slowly and looked around the room. Susurrations away by the walls let her know the sharks were still out there. The upturned sofa still loomed evilly to one side of her, and Dan's hands still worked the keyboard at the other.