Ways to See a Ghost (6 page)

After an achingly slow hour and a half of waiting, Isis looked into the hallway, at the closed-off door leading to the room full of phoney psychics.

She sighed. “What are they still talking about in there?”

“I find out,” said Angel, floating off Isis’s lap.

“No!” whispered Isis, waving her hands. “You promised!”

Angel paused, a wisp by the door.

“I not going in, only looking. I stay in the wall.”

“No,” said Isis.

“You can hold my hand,” said Angel, tilting her colourless head, widening her black-hole eyes. “You’ll see too.”

“No.” said Isis. “We decided not to do that any more.”

“You ’sided.” said Angel. “I want to!”

“It’s spying…” said Isis, but she could hear the resolve in her voice weakening.

Angel grinned, knowing she’d won, and ran to the far wall of the hallway, her feet a few centimetres from the floor. She pressed her fragile forehead against the solid mass of the wall and pushed. Her eyes and nose, forehead and ears disappeared into the plaster. Her curly hair, then her neck vanished next, and when her shoulders were against the paint, she stopped.

All Isis could see was the toddler’s almost transparent, headless form leaning into the wall. A short arm swung backwards, pudgy fingers wriggling at the end of it.

“This is very bad,” said Isis, but to herself, because Angel wasn’t listening. She crossed the hallway, took the small, weightless hand in her own, shut her eyes… and she could see.

Chair legs, with a man’s legs and feet between them. The red velvet pillow of a woman’s bottom, overflowing from her seat. The black-clothed back of a man wearing a suit, his ginger-haired head distantly above. It was a low-down, foreshortened view of the room. The view from near the floor. Angel’s view.

The scene shifted. Angel was turning her head.
Philip Syndal came into sight, his chin looking very round and babyish from this perspective. His mouth was opening and shutting, his hands waving in silence.

“You need to put your ears through as well,” whispered Isis. “I can’t hear anything.” Angel shifted position; there was a muffled rushing in Isis’s ears, then words.

“… vote unanimously agreed, which means, Calista, I am very happy to welcome you to the Welkin Society. I hope you find it as rewarding as our other members do.”

“Thank you. I can’t tell you how pleased I am.”

There was a jolting, sickening lurch in Isis’s vision, as Angel wriggled sideways along the wall. Now Isis had a view of Cally, sitting three places along the table from Philip Syndal. Her mum pushed her hair back from her face and smoothed it down, a flush of colour in her cheeks.

“
Mummy happy.
” Angel’s whisper drifted through the wall.

Their shared view lurched again, and Isis swallowed, clenching the muscles of her stomach.

Angel was looking at Philip Syndal now, his features sagging from charming to solemn. “And now we must turn to the great sadness our group has suffered. There is an empty seat at this table, the seat of a visionary, of our
founder. He was our protector, a kindly father to us all.”

“A terrible loss,” said the curly haired woman, Andrea.

“But the question is what we should do without Norman leading us.”

“I wonder if we should even continue as a society,” said a man’s softly spoken voice. Isis couldn’t see who it was.

“You may wonder, Ian,” said Andrea, loud and importantly. “But I
know
he wants us to carry on. I have felt his presence many times in these last weeks, telling me to continue his good work.”

“You, particularly?” said the softly spoken man.

Andrea turned and nodded at whoever it was. “
Someone
will have to take on leadership of the society,” she said.

Philip Syndal looked sharply at her. “Yes, well. We’ll come to that later.” He turned his gaze to the rest of the table. “Norman set up the society to be greater than any of us. He created a beacon of hope in this world, and the next. We are a meeting point for clairvoyants, clairaudients, channellers, psychics and any persons with an ability that extends beyond the everyday, into the supernatural. Of course, it’s very important who our next leader is, and there will be elections in due course. But as treasurer of the society, I will take on temporary leadership for now.”

“When will the elections be?” asked Andrea.

Irritation flashed across Philip’s face, but it was quickly smoothed into a smile. “It may take a few weeks, Andrea. I have to write to our more far-flung members.”

“I hope it’s not too long,” she muttered. “As I said, I have felt Norman’s presence, I am sure he is calling me.”

“Well I’ve felt him too!” snapped the posh, elderly woman.

“And me,” said the man Isis couldn’t see.

Philip Syndal picked up his papers, shuffling the top two sheets. “I’m sure Norman visits us all,” he said. “Perhaps in our meditation today, we will hear him speak.”

“I would be utterly amazed if they did,” said a voice next to Isis, inside the wall. She gasped, letting go of Angel’s hand and falling back into the hallway. Her stomach lurched at the sudden change, and she pressed her hand over her shut-tight mouth, holding back a retch.

Angel tumbled out of the wall after her.

“Isis poorly?” she asked, looking worried.

“I let go too quick,” Isis whispered.

Part of the blue painted plaster of the wall dissolved into the powdery shape of a tall, thin man. A body pulled itself out, then a head, leaving the paint unmarked and
perfect. It was the ghost from the park and the seance. Mandeville.

He nodded his head in greeting. Angel squeaked and huddled up to Isis.

“Very good to see you again,” he said.

Isis swallowed and shivered, her stomach slowly untwisting.

“I must say,” Mandeville continued, “your channelling powers are unique. You are a true adept.”

“What are you doing here?” hissed Isis. “Are you waiting for a seance?”

“In there?” Mandeville laughed, dusty fibres coughing out of his mouth. “Those fantasists won’t be summoning anyone. They might sleep a little during their so-called meditation.” He slithered down to the floor, his limbs feathering outwards.

Isis shuffled away from him. The kitchen door was open behind her and noisy cartoon chatter was spilling out through the gap, but the bright voices sounded odd and out of place now.

“Are you following me or something?” she asked.

“Or something,” said Mandeville, with one of his yellow-teeth smiles. He stretched out his long legs in their
velvet trousers. The material was ancient and decaying; in places the pale glow of his bloodless flesh showed through them. “You aren’t the only one with an interest in the Welkin Society.”

“I don’t have an interest,” said Isis. “It’s Cally who joined.”

“Really?” Mandeville looked with his blue-star eyes at the wall, beyond which the Welkin Society were still in their meeting.

“You know,” he said, “I was devoted to seances when I was alive. I personally knew several of the great psychics of my time. Mrs Pargetter, Arthur Wrioseley, Sebastian Blackstone. I was amazed and entranced by their performances, I even wrote an essay for the
Occult Review
on the nature of phantoms.”

Angel crept around behind Isis, hiding from him.

“I believed the psychics without question,” continued Mandeville. “That is, until I died. Immediately, I rushed to a seance, and what did I discover? My revered teachers were really fraudsters and fakes! Mrs Pargetter was deaf to my cries. Arthur Wrioseley couldn’t see me. As for Sebastian Blackstone, the disembodied voices he so marvellously conjured turned out to be his wife shouting from inside a cleverly concealed cupboard. I had laboured so hard,
sacrificed my
life
in the cause of spiritualism, only to find I could pass nothing on. That’s when I made my vow to spend my ghost-hood searching for a true channel so I could speak to the living.”

“You wanted to be famous,” said Isis.

“No! I wanted to dispel fear, and help people accept their end.” He tilted his head. “Perhaps a little famous. In any case, I went hunting for genuine psychics.”

Isis caught her breath. She was suddenly desperate to find someone like herself.

“Did you find any?” she whispered.

Mandeville nodded, a grimy whirlwind, his head half inside the wall.

“But there was a problem.”

Isis let her breath out. There were always problems.

Mandeville continued. “You see, my dear, I don’t believe it’s death alone that creates a ghost. It is the form of death. Most spirits, souls if you want, they pass quietly into whatever lies beyond. But those of us who die tragically, or unexpectedly, we are held back, caught in the mists, as it were. The murdered wife, the headless horseman – in my death I discovered the clichés turn out to be true. Of course, such phantoms are filled with longings, unhappiness
and unfinished business. Anyone with real psychic powers is a burning flame, around which they circle like moths, endlessly, relentlessly.” His eyes held Isis. “Eventually the psychic is driven insane by it.” Sorrow flickered on his dusty features. “Every true psychic I ever found was mad before they reached adulthood. Locked in asylums, hearing voices. The poor things couldn’t be cured, because the doctors never realised the voices were real.”

The ghost examined her, as if checking for signs of insanity, and Isis shivered, not just from Angel behind her. Would she go mad too? Sometimes it felt all too possible. She wrapped her arms around herself.

“However, none of them were as strong as you. And you can do something I have never seen before.” Mandeville’s eyes were a distant blue, his gaze focused on her. “How did you do it? Putting your hands into that yobbish ghost?”

Isis squeezed her hands on her arms, locking herself together. She wasn’t sure, but she could remember the first time. Angel had been clinging onto her all day, overwhelming in her neediness. Eventually, furiously, Isis had shoved at her, surprising them both when her hands connected with Angel’s nothing-body. How had she done it? She couldn’t explain, not even to a ghost.

“I just… focus,” she said.

Mandeville was silent for a moment. Then he said quietly, “You could save us.”

Angel squeaked again, and pressed close to Isis, sending a chill into her back. Isis didn’t speak. She didn’t want him to go on, she didn’t want to get drawn in. He’d just admitted it himself: ghosts always wanted something.

Mandeville couldn’t match her silence.

“Do you want to know what you can save us
from?
” She still didn’t answer, so he carried on. “It has no name for itself, so I call it a Devourer because that is what it does.”

He paused, obviously waiting for a question she had no intention of asking. After a moment he continued. “I only heard rumours of it, at first. Ghosts are always telling tales of things they’ve seen in the dark. Ghouls, demons and suchlike. Most of the time I ignore them, but there was one… she was little more than a wraith, barely a memory of herself, and so ancient she didn’t even understand what a wheel was for. She haunted the long forgotten graves of prehistoric peoples, their remains mere shadows in the soil. And she told me of something in one of those graves, caught in the dusty circle of a primeval skull. It had attacked her, but she’d escaped. An eater of ghosts, she said, which
intrigued me. It’s hard to explain to the living, but to ghosts such ancient graves are like… a deep abyss in the ocean. And in the abyss was something wild, something left from a time before humans had language. I made the trek. From a safe distance, I spoke to it in simple words, as one might to a baby, and it learned them with a speed that amazed me. It has a natural cunning, where its own interests are concerned.”

Angel was clinging to Isis, both of them caught in his story. Isis shivered, and not just from cold. When Mandeville had first mentioned the Devourer, he’d implied it had appeared on its own. Now it sounded like…

“You brought it out, didn’t you?” asked Isis.

The ghost clasped his fingers into a bony basket. “The wraith who told me about it had managed to fend it off, and she was little more than a whisper. So I concluded it must be feeble, able to frighten but not to harm. I only wanted to help, my dear. I was going to protect the next psychic I found by giving them this creature. I thought it would huddle unnoticed in their head, as it had huddled in the ancient skull, and scare away the worst excesses of the ghost world. I imagined it behaving like the faithful dog that protects its owner,” he sighed, a mouldy plume.
“My imaginings were nothing like the reality. It never occurred to me the Devourer would grow so quickly, or that it was small only because it had little to eat. I never realised it would be so… ambulatory.”

Mandeville leaned his head against the wall, sinking in a little. “I should have left it down in the dark. It’s too bright here, too close to the living. With every ghost it devours it gets stronger, only wanting more. I’m frightened of what will happen, to all of us.”

Isis stared at him, horrified. And she knew exactly where this was heading; Mandeville was a ghost, after all.