The Last Days of Jack Sparks (12 page)

1
When the true nature of the video came to light, YouTube and every other online video platform banned it. They continue to ban its every reappearance. The video, however, still spreads via torrent sites –
Alistair.

Sherilyn Chastain and I run side by side along a corridor, limbs pumping.

‘The entity knows we’ve got it,’ she says. ‘It’ll avoid us for as long as it can, but it can’t hide forever.’

To our left, through a series of stylised rectangular portholes, the shores of Lantau Island and the other boats in the marina go sadly unadmired. We’re far more interested in capturing and dealing with this ghost.

Or at least Chastain is interested in that. I’m interested in watching her and sidekick Fang pretend to catch a pretend thing for their clients’ benefit. These fascinating specimens are the very definition of people making a fuss over nothing.

I always knew I’d have to visit a haunted house during the making of this book. That much was a given. I just never expected that house to be on water. And in fairness, neither did I expect this Hong Kong trip to permanently alter my thoughts on the supernatural.

Chastain jabs a finger at the floor. ‘Last level. Fang: seal up behind us.’ She darts through a side door, which reveals stairs going down. As I follow, two steps at a time for the hell of it, Fang hangs back to perform the door-sealing ritual, her face set in grim concentration. A Chinese girl barely out of her teens, acting like she’s been doing this for a century.

‘Jack!’ Chastain’s urgent alarm rebounds off the walls as I blunder in through the next door down, confused. I arrive in a long corridor that runs the length of the boat’s underbelly. Chastain’s head moves as if following something along the corridor towards me.

A sudden wind lashes my face and blows my hair up.

Chastain barks out a military order. ‘Get back!’

What do you do? When you’re an atheist, and a mad combat magician tells you to take immediate action to avoid an incoming paranormal entity on a Hong Kong houseboat, what exactly do you do about that?

So it’s two hours ago, and the Lengs are not happy with Sherilyn Chastain, not happy at all. They bristle with resentment and mistrust, which is interesting. It also makes having lunch with them an uncomfortable experience.

The Lengs, Chastain, Fang and I are dining al fresco at a Thai restaurant on Lantau Island’s Discovery Bay Plaza. It’s a gorgeous day, but windy. Every few minutes, a muscular gust forces us all to hold down the tablecloth and our wine glasses. This shared experience may not exactly break the ice, but there’s at least a hairline crack. Fang doesn’t help one bit. No charm offensive here. She just sits in her black hoodie and her metal-plated New Rock boots, which weigh more than she does. Straight-backed and austere, she spoons soup from bowl to mouth, tracking birds as they fly, moving her eyes not her head. I’m convinced she’s one of those creepy new human-replacement droids.

The largest of Hong Kong’s outlying islands, Lantau boasts scenery that does its damnedest to distract me from both the conversation and my rancid hangover. It’s so much greener than the city. Buildings jut sparsely up from mountains. A quarter-moon sliver of beach provides a focal point for sunbathers, while the vast choppy sea carries a billion bobbing diamonds. You’d never know that in a nearby bay sits a boat that has reportedly put Guiren and Jiao Leng’s family through a living hell.

My fresh green curry looks exquisite when I photograph it for my followers, but I’m finding it hard to eat. In my defence, the last three nights have been big. I’ve barely slept. Last night alone, I ventured off the beaten track in the party district of Wan Chai. On those narrower, darker and more intriguing streets, where market stalls were locked up for the night, I found bars and people dedicated to the pursuit of oblivion. I dimly recall onlookers wolf-whistling as tequila and triple sec were poured straight from the bottles into my mouth, all to a ‘Gangnam Style’ soundtrack. Hence the cold-sweat horrors that cling to me today.

I’ve also made headway in my video investigation. This week, it became clear that my social media sniffer dogs – the great unwashed Sparks-following public – have no idea where the video came from and are unlikely to find out. It also became clear that the only websites sufficiently enthused to mount an in-depth analysis believe in the supernatural and are therefore not to be trusted. So in the early hours of Wednesday morning, while loaded, I took matters into my own hands. I watched the video again and again, obsessing over each and every pixel. And on the fifty-sixth viewing, I finally saw something no one else had noticed. Something that only appears when Camera Boy dips his frame to very briefly capture the lower part of a wall.

You never quite see the
whole
thing, but you see enough to determine what it is: a two-pin plug socket embedded in that wall. Two vertical slits with an arch-shaped hole beneath them, the whole thing resembling a tiny shocked face. This means the video was shot in North America. Or Canada. Oh, or Mexico. Which admittedly doesn’t narrow things down as much as I’d prefer, but hey, we now have the correct
continent
, ladies and gents.

The net closes in . . .

The Lengs are a naturally attractive couple, upon whom trauma has taken its toll.

The flesh around their eyes is baggier and darker than it should be on people in their mid-thirties, even given the ferocious work ethic of China’s professionals, and they’re prone to lapse into ten-mile stares. Guiren’s left arm rests in a sling and he pops painkillers between his starter and main. Thanks to those charlatans Maddelena and Maria Corvi, I’m vigilant for signs that the Lengs are stooges hired to make Chastain look good. Thus far, the fact that they’re disgruntled customers is achieving quite the opposite. So will this afternoon’s findings correspond to my existing SPOOKS List? Are the Lengs either lying or being lied to?

They initially refused to have a journalist involved today. Only when they were told my name and realised they’d read and adored all my books did they acquiesce. I’m not allowed to actually quiz them myself, but it’s agreed that they will relate their story, to serve the dual purpose of informing me while allowing everybody to agree on the events so far.

Chastain is modelling an unshowy business suit with her hair no less purple but slicked back. Even your modern combat magician has to ape corporate standards to reassure their clients. She speaks Cantonese fluently back at the Lengs, while Fang translates for my benefit, ignoring all requests for repetition or clarification. Truth be told, Fang doesn’t like me. I’ve tried bonding with her over rock music, but she only likes Scandinavian black metal nonsense. Bands with spiky, incomprehensible logos.

In September, Guiren and Jiao ‘got tired of paying rent’ (oh, the poor lambs) and decided to have their own houseboat built. Despite high operating costs and the occasional typhoon, houseboat-living is perfectly viable and popular in Hong Kong, with many communities clustered in bays around the region. Of course, it’s especially viable when you’re minted.

The couple moved in on 30 September, which they claim was an auspicious date for a big move. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear all that astrology talk was meaningless twaddle. The Lengs’ dream of ‘calm and centred living’, to ease the stress of their work as finance directors for one of Hong Kong’s biggest media companies, quickly became a nightmare once they took residence.

On the third night, Guiren awoke to hear distant footsteps. ‘It was like someone pacing about, endlessly,’ he says. ‘I didn’t wake Jiao or the children: I just got up, grabbed a torch as a weapon and crept in the direction of the sound. I followed the footsteps up a level to the captain’s bridge, which we use as a living space, because the boat is only ever moved when something needs to be repaired.

‘The footsteps stopped when I entered. There were no other sounds, apart from the wind and water outside. The first things I noticed were my and Jiao’s computer screens, which sit side by side at the front. They were both on, even though we’d turned them off. The browsers were open and each showed full-screen videos of blazing fire.’

Gripping his torch so tight that he cracked the casing, Guiren searched the boat from bow to stern, finding nothing and no one. Assuming some freak had broken in, he had the locks changed, telling Jiao they were faulty. I’ve no idea why he lied to his wife. The woman is so clearly ruthless that I’d set her on an intruder in a heartbeat.

Yet Guiren couldn’t keep his secret for long. The night after he switched those locks, the footsteps returned, closer to the bedroom. This time, they woke Jiao and five-year-old Bo, the youngest of their three daughters. Guiren locked his family in one bedroom, then mounted another search.

‘That night,’ he says, ‘I saw a face in the fire on the monitor screens. A silhouetted face twisted into a silent scream. It kept moving from one monitor to the other, as if tormented.’

That’s when the kids started screaming. According to Jiao, they were being attacked by an invisible force. She claims she tried to protect them, ‘but how do you fight thin air?’

‘The kids all ended up with bruises and scrapes,’ says Guiren. ‘At the time, I stupidly thought my family had suffered hysteria in that locked room, scaring themselves, bumping into each other. Still, I moved them to an apartment in the city and stayed on the boat by myself. I was determined to find out what was going on.’

Guiren became fixated on the idea of the intruder’s behaviour escalating to kidnappings and ransom demands. He even assigned a bodyguard to live in his family’s apartment. Then, one night, on the boat, something happened that led him to call Sherilyn Chastain.

‘The footsteps came back, but now they were harder, faster. Whoever this was, they were running around the boat. Running like crazy. The boat even shook, like they were careering into the walls. I heard things fall and break.’

That night, Guiren was armed with more than a torch. He declines to specify the exact nature of the weapon due to restrictive national laws, but you can imagine. ‘I edged along a corridor on the starboard side. The floor was covered in broken glass, because our family portrait had been ripped from the wall and hurled to the ground. Further along the corridor, the monitors were glowing again on the bridge. Something came along that corridor at me fast, with footsteps to match. The best way I can describe it is a cloud of smoke in mid-air. A fat smoke cloud, thrashing about. I knew then that we were dealing with something . . . elemental. Suddenly it was all around me. This whirlwind: screaming, spinning me, hurling me against walls. I was so scared. I managed to get away, then ran and jumped over the side of the boat into the marina. The shock of the cold water at four a.m. almost killed me. I don’t know whether it was the spirit’s attack or the fall, but I ended up with this arm broken in three places.’

It’s a compelling story, but what’s the reality here? If you’re anything like me, you may sense a different and disturbing tale bubbling beneath. But when one of Guiren’s work colleagues discreetly pointed him in Sherilyn Chastain’s direction, the Aussie formed her own narrative.

Two weeks back, Chastain and Fang visited to assess the boat. Chastain did indeed detect a presence on board, then tried to deal with it the following day. They left satisfied their work was done, but this was seemingly not the case.

Five nights ago, those restless nocturnal feet made a big comeback. The Lengs’ kids had already fallen ill with some grim vomiting bug, and Jiao suffered splitting headaches. When a dismayed Guiren investigated new footsteps, once again in the middle of the night, those bridge monitors again showed the screaming face in fire, jerking from one to the other. And once again while he wasn’t present, the spirit attacked the kids, this time throwing Bo against a wall and giving her concussion. As the family fled the boat, middle daughter Mei-Hua fell screaming into the water, narrowly missing one of the poles supporting the jetty. Guiren jumped in and managed to save her, but the experience left everyone ‘very badly shaken’ and living back at the apartment.

‘It’s not unusual,’ says Chastain of the ghost’s return, as we all walk from the plaza, following the curve of the beach towards the marina. As much as she feigns nonchalance, this affair has left its mark on her too. By the end of lunch, she had succeeded in convincing the Lengs (a) not to sue her; and (b) that she fully intended to finish the job she’d begun, at no extra cost to them, but it was a close call.

‘Nine times out of ten, the first thing I try and do is reason with the spirit,’ she explains. ‘And nine times out of ten that works. But sometimes you think you’ve reached an understanding, when you actually haven’t.’

The misunderstanding, as Chastain sees it, was that she thought the entity had agreed to move on to the afterlife, when actually it had other ideas. Of course, my own view of the main misunderstanding here is that the entity never existed in the first place.

With typically wishy-washy vagueness, Chastain sees the entity as ‘possibly trapped here on earth, for some reason. I haven’t been able to confirm, in my mind, whether it’s a human spirit or a demon.’

‘Well, how could you,’ I jibe, ‘with all these multiple models flying about?’

She’s clearly stressed out of her mind, because my comment earns me a glare instead of a snappy comeback. ‘Perhaps it only thinks it’s trapped here. Either way, it has some kind of emotional attachment to this life. Our goal is to move it on.’

Her face tightens when I ask what she’ll do if it refuses to play ball this time. ‘Let’s cross that bridge . . .’ she says, trailing off and changing the subject. Chastain really is splendidly melodramatic good value.

The wind whips at Sherilyn Chastain as she stands on the front deck of the Lengs’ boat. She’s deep in concentration, arms stretched out as though practising t’ai chi.