Spirit Level, page 11
‘Of course, dear. I haven’t lost my memory yet.’
Adella had either been a very short woman all her life, or else age had shrunk her. She barely came up as far as Danny’s shoulder. Her hair had been shorn almost shorter than his own in what he was half-confident was called a pageboy cut. Either she was meticulous about maintaining the auburn colour or else L’Oréal should be requesting her body for medical research. A pair of sharp brown eyes surrounded by an ordnance-survey map’s worth of lines stared out from underneath her fringe. Danny fought the urge to shield her from the gentle-but-persistent November breeze in case it blew her away.
‘Great,’ Danny said. ‘Do you still feel up for doing a seance?’ He wouldn’t have blamed her for changing her mind. An hour probably made a lot of difference when there weren’t all that many left in you.
‘Yes,’ replied the old woman. Although she didn’t move from the door, Adella looked to be in two minds about something.
‘Is everything okay?’ he asked.
‘How do I know you’re not some sort of criminal?’
Danny had faced a lot of unusual things in the last week, but this still managed to catch him off guard. ‘Excuse me?’ he reacted, instinctively taking another step back.
‘Only, they warn us about this, in our social club. About strange men asking to be let in and then stealing all our valuables.’
Danny looked about for support and, finding none, cleared his throat and did his best to appear as non-threatening as possible. ‘If you’re not comfortable with letting me in, then that’s . . . I’m not a . . .’ He stopped, at a loss. At the very least, he was glad Nudge wasn’t around to see this. ‘Should we maybe leave it, so?’
Adella looked him up and down. ‘I think you’re probably okay.’ She slowly stood aside and ushered him in.
Danny was half-tempted to cut his losses and run but, after a heartbeat of indecision, he squeezed past her.
‘Just know that I’ve arranged for my friend Joan to call in half an hour and if I don’t answer, she’s going to call the guards.’
At this, Danny paused in the doorway for a moment.
‘Would you like a cup of tea? Tesco didn’t have any Club Milks, but I have some Viscounts left if you’d like?’
‘That would be lovely, thanks.’ Danny said, deciding that he was going to be as agreeable as possible during this whole experience in the hope that he could get out of here without being charged with elder abuse.
He followed the old woman into the house. The front door led directly into a small living room and Danny had to step carefully to avoid knocking things over. A beige reclining chair took pride of place in front of a surprisingly modern-looking flat-screen TV where Tipping Point was playing on mute. The rest of the floor space was taken up by an overstuffed couch and an enormous collection of end tables, cabinets and shelves teeming with pictures and ornaments. The photos featured a collection of toddlers gurning at the camera, infants staring, wide-eyed, at the too-close lens and teenagers posing awkwardly with certificates or prizes. They ranged from ultra-HD to grainy, sepia-toned photos to Polaroids. Adella clearly had an extensive family.
She motioned for Danny to walk through the maze of obstacles to a small but nicely appointed kitchen-slash-dining area. There were fewer pictures in here, although the ones that did adorn the walls were notice-ably older. Danny’s eyes were drawn to a black-and-white photo of two young women smiling awkwardly in bright white uniforms.
Adella caught him staring. ‘That’s my sister and me after I qualified as a nurse. Two in the family. Daddy was very proud, although, I still think he would have preferred at least one boy.’
Danny sat down, as directed, at an ancient Formica-topped dining table as the medium busied herself with the kettle and produced some chocolate biscuits, as promised.
‘How long has it been since you’ve done a seance?’ Danny asked.
‘Oh, I haven’t done it regularly in nearly twenty years,’ Adella said, staring critically at the inside of a cup until she finally decided that it would be fit for guests.
‘How did you get into it?’ Danny asked.
She paused, as the kettle boiled, as if she’d never thought about the question before. ‘I’ve always had the gift, of course, but I didn’t start to use it properly until I transferred into hospice nursing. I would occasionally help some of the troubled souls transition and, I suppose, word got around.’
‘You could actually see and hear them? These souls?’ Danny asked. Her story sounded good, but he’d been soured by his other experiences so far that day.
‘Oh yes,’ she said solemnly, as she picked up two steaming cups and carefully started to carry them the short distance between the kitchen and dining table. ‘The ones that hang around are usually lost and in need of some help. You just have to treat them with kindness and compassion.’
Nudge chose this moment to walk through her front door. ‘The fucking neck on that prick. You should have heard him,’ he announced, not bothering to lower his voice. “Oh, Lisa,”’ he said in a nasally whine, ‘“this must be so hard on you. If you ever need a shoulder to cry on . . .”’
‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ screamed Adella and promptly keeled over.
Chapter 15
Danny had done a first-aid course back in school, mostly because signing up qualified you for a day off actual classwork. The very serious man leading the lesson had spent a great deal of time explaining the steps to take after someone has a heart attack. The first few minutes of care, he had told them, could make the difference between the victim’s life and death.
Regrettably, all this information had fled Danny’s mind in panic as he surveyed the broken crockery, spilled tea and the octogenarian lying face down in the middle of it all. He tore his gaze away towards Nudge, who was staring down at the prone old woman in horror. They made terrified eye contact.
‘She could see me!’
‘What the fuck do I do?’
‘You have to save her.’
‘Save her how?’ Danny asked, even as he moved gingerly to check for a pulse. That was definitely one of the steps, although he wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to come before or after establishing an airway. He couldn’t even really remember what ‘establishing an airway’ meant. So, the first thing Danny did was to try and roll her onto her side. She was surprisingly heavy for someone so slight. Her slack face pretty much told Danny all he needed to know but, to be sure, he pressed two trembling fingers to the side of her throat. He probed around the area where he figured the pulse was supposed to be but found nothing. ‘I don’t think she’s breathing,’ he said.
‘Well, don’t just sit there. Do the thing. What’s it called? CPR!’
Danny nodded and rolled the older woman fully onto her back and then hesitated. It was ironic that he’d had a first-hand refresher session on the process just the week before, but he’d been otherwise engaged at the time, being dead and all. He knew that it was supposed to start with the chest compressions though and there was something to do with a Bee Gees’ song. He clasped both his hands over where he guessed the old woman’s breastbone was and was about to start pushing when an unexpected voice interrupted him.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Adella asked. She stood, confusingly, a few feet from her own rapidly cooling body.
Nudge and Danny gawped at the standing Adella and then slowly, almost in unison, panned back down to the collapsed woman on the floor.
‘Who is that?’ she shrieked, pointing at the body. She then turned to Nudge. ‘And who are you? How did you get in?’
A lightbulb switched on in the recesses of Danny’s brain. ‘You’re a ghost,’ he said and felt immediately stupid for doing so.
‘A ghost!?’ Adella scoffed. ‘What are you talking about? That doesn’t make . . .’ She trailed off as she took in the body on the floor.
Now that Danny was looking at her properly, he could see similarities to Nudge’s condition. Her outline was hard to define from the cabinets behind her and her voice had the same strange quality as Nudge’s, not quiet but like dialogue that had been badly sound-mixed in a movie. You had to concentrate to hear them.
‘Oh no,’ she said, as realisation dawned. She looked again at Nudge and anger seemed to replace confusion. ‘What the hell were you doing, storming in here like that? Were you dragged up?’ she shouted.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he replied sincerely. ‘I’ve gotten so used to people not being able to see me.’
‘That’s no excuse to act like a . . .’ she struggled for a harsh enough word ‘. . . barbarian!’ Then she seemed to remember something with a start. Her head whipped around to Danny. ‘Well, what are you doing just sitting there? Save me!’
Danny snapped back to reality, or what approached it these days. ‘Yes! Sorry. How?’
Adella stepped up to Danny’s shoulder. ‘Well, first move me away from all of this broken china, unless you want to drive shards of the stuff into my spine while you’re doing the compressions.’
Danny moved to comply as her nursing training seemed to come back to her. ‘I suppose there’s no need to check for breathing, considering, so I need you to find the breastbone and firmly . . .’ Adella trailed off and blinked, as if to clear her head. ‘Firmly press down with the palms . . .’ Again, she stopped as if interrupted and looked around in confusion.
Danny looked up from where he’d been pulling her body to a more suitable patch of floor. There was serious fear rising in her face now. Even more so than earlier.
‘Adella, are you all right?’ Danny really felt he was due some sort of award for asking stupid questions.
Nudge stepped towards her and then stopped, as if he wasn’t sure what the protocol for ghost-on-ghost contact was. ‘What’s wrong?’
Adella was looking around her with increasing panic. ‘No. No,’ she muttered. ‘This isn’t right. This isn’t how it’s supposed to—’
It happened so quickly that both Nudge and Danny jumped back in fright, Nudge stepping entirely through a cabinet and Danny hopping backwards, still half-crouched, into the dining table.
As if someone had tied a bungee cord around her middle and then attached the other end to a speeding lorry, Adella was suddenly pulled completely off her feet and through the back wall of the house. Danny jumped up and got a split-second view through the back window of her flailing form as it was hauled, two feet off the ground, through the garden fence, before disappearing.
For a moment there was complete silence in the tiny cottage until the sound of a phone ringing made both men flinch in fright. It was an old landline, attached to the wall, between the kitchen and the living room.
‘Who the hell could that be?’ Nudge asked.
‘I think it’s Joan,’ Danny said, still in shock.
‘Who the fuck is Joan?’
*
Danny sat solemnly on the kerb a few doors down from Adella’s house. The small street had been too narrow for the ambulance, so it had been parked further back on the main road as the paramedics shuttled their trolley over the short distance.
Once the initial panic about watching a disembodied spirit be yanked away against her will had passed, it had been replaced with an entirely new feeling of panic about being alone in a house with the corpse of a stranger. There didn’t seem to be much call for continuing with the CPR, so Danny had done the only other thing he could think of and dialled 999. The ambulance had responded twenty minutes later and the paramedics only took a few moments to declare the obvious. The police had arrived shortly afterwards and were very curious to know how Danny had found himself in a house with a dead pensioner.
Danny had told the truth. Well, obviously, he hadn’t told the truth, but he’d told a version that was close enough to the truth without getting himself sectioned. He’d explained his recent accident and showed the guards the flyer he’d obtained earlier. He recounted how they’d met as arranged and that the old lady hadn’t closed the door properly after he’d come in. The door had blown open suddenly and the slam had given her such a shock that she’d keeled over.
Luckily, Adella’s friend Joan had kept ringing and eventually, one of the guards had answered. She was able to confirm, once her initial shock had passed, that Adella had indeed planned a seance session. A few more minutes of questioning revealed that she’d also had a weak heart, and that this had not been her first heart attack. A cursory search of her room had revealed a prescription that hadn’t been refilled in over a month and so they were begrudgingly prepared to accept his explanation, although the older guard had told Danny that he would have to stay in the city for the next while until they completed their investigation.
Danny was just about to ask if he would be allowed to leave when he’d heard a commotion.
‘The next of kin’s arrived,’ one of the younger guards had muttered to a paramedic.
Danny had craned his head to see a pale young woman push her way to the front door of the cottage. There was a brief moment of argument before the guard had let her in. It was almost a full half an hour before she’d re-emerged, while Danny waited on the kerb.
Nudge had been urging him to get out of there ever since they’d rung for the ambulance. The incident with Adella’s spirit had terrified him and he looked like he wanted to get as far away from where it had happened as possible. But even though Danny couldn’t explain why, he felt like he owed Adella’s family an explanation. Although, God only knew what he was going to say to them.
At last the young woman came back out of the cottage, in conversation with the more senior of the guards. They talked quietly for a moment before he nodded in Danny’s direction. The woman turned and fixed him with a gaze that made his mouth go dry. She said a few more inaudible words to the guard before walking purposefully towards Danny. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said brusquely.
Then, to his surprise, she turned and stared Nudge dead in the eye.
‘Both of you.’
Chapter 16
The three of them left the circus of high-vis jackets behind and made the short walk to a small park nearby. It was too late and cold for families to be wandering through it and too early for any teenagers to be surreptitiously smoking there, so they didn’t have to worry about being overheard.
Well, they’d eventually made the short walk. The woman, who had introduced herself as Lucy, had to reiterate several times that she could see Nudge and then impatiently wait for both of them to pick their jaws up off the floor. After she’d explained that this was a conversation that should probably not be taking place within earshot of the police, they followed her into the rapidly darkening evening.
Lucy was bundled up against the cold in an oversized camelhair coat over a green woolly jumper and maroon cords. To Danny’s eye it looked like each article of clothing had been taken from someone with a vastly different body shape, age and personal style, but he assumed it must be some sort of vintage, thrift-shop chic.
In the park, the steam that condensed in front of her face from the cold was joined by wisps of smoke as she lit a John Player Blue and, after checking that it wasn’t too damp, sat down on a bench and examined them critically. She took a particularly deep drag on her cigarette before speaking for the first time since they’d met outside the house. ‘So, what in the blazes actually happened?’
Danny looked to Nudge for support but his friend’s delight in finding someone else who could see and hear him had apparently departed.
‘Well,’ Danny started, taking a nip from his flask to ward off the cold and the awkwardness of this conversation. ‘We arranged to do a reading with Adella. Actually, we found her flyer at another medium’s office. We went to a few today, you see? But they couldn’t see Nudge. This is Nudge, by the way. I’m Danny—’
Lucy held up a hand to stop him and then pointed at Nudge. ‘How about we start with how he ended up like this?’
Danny nodded and gave an abridged overview of their recent ordeals. Lucy didn’t interrupt much except to make a face when he mentioned the other psychics they’d been to see. It was a nice face, Danny couldn’t help but notice (and immediately felt guilty for doing so). It was also familiar. She must have been one of the many grandchildren in the photos that adorned Adella’s house, Danny assumed.
He didn’t quite get the reaction he’d expected when he finally explained how Nudge’s abrupt appearance had caused Adella’s demise. She let out a snort of laughter that descended to a fit of hysterical giggles. Seeing the alarmed expressions on both their faces Lucy held up her hands in an attempt to explain. ‘Sorry, it’s not what it looks like.’ She took a deep shuddering breath and seemed to get a grip on herself. ‘It’s just, Adella spent her entire life helping send spirits to the other side and one ended up sending her.’
Her shoulders continued to shake slightly but Danny could see that there were tears in her eyes now as the shock wore off. He looked at Nudge, but he seemed equally as lost and uncomfortable about the situation. Luckily for everyone concerned, Lucy took a series of deep breaths and steadied herself before either of them had to try and console her. ‘I told her that she shouldn’t be living alone at her age,’ she said, more to herself than anyone else.
‘Were you two close?’ Nudge asked.
Lucy looked up. ‘We were. Once, at least.’
Danny was a bit out of his depth. His grandparents had all passed away before he’d hit his teens, so he’d never had to deal with that kind of loss as an adult. In fact, the only loss he’d really had to face was currently standing five feet from him.
‘I’m sorry. I really am,’ Nudge said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare her like that.’
Lucy leaned back on the bench, glanced down at her smoke, which had gone out, and flicked it in the general direction of the bin next to her. ‘You weren’t to know. You were probably the first ghost she’d seen in close to twenty years. It fades, you see? With age.’
