Spirit Level, page 25
‘Let him go,’ Nudge shouted. From the corner of his rapidly darkening vision, Danny saw the ghost run around to where the hammer lay and unsuccessfully try to pick it up. His vision began to tunnel. The edges of his world turned a familiar shade of dark purple. It was not unlike the night on the canal.
‘I said, LET HIM GO!’ Nudge roared. There was a strange, extra harmonic to it now. Around them, the tools on the racks rattled and several fell from their hooks.
Ray’s grip slackened slightly in shock, and he looked over to where the ghost had bent down again for the hammer. This time he didn’t bother to try and pick it up but just swept his hand across it as if he was trying to slide it towards Danny.
It moved. Danny and Ray watched as, at Nudge’s touch, the hammer skidded across the concrete.
Unfortunately for Danny, it was moving in entirely the wrong direction.
Danny had gone to a calm place now. Well, that’s it. At least my spirit won’t have far to travel.
His thoughts were interrupted by a sound like a gong. Or, more accurately, the sound of a large lump hammer striking the bottom of an enormous glass bulb.
Both strangler and stranglee turned their heads to look at the spiderweb pattern of cracks that radiated out from where the hammer had hit the mill. Ray let go of Danny’s throat and pushed himself up, stumbling towards his creation. ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ the man repeated. He held up his palms to the side of the glass as if he was about to try to hold it together with his bare hands.
Danny glanced over to where Lucy had been thrown. She was conscious and slowly pulling herself up against the locker. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
Danny nodded and turned his attention back to Ray, who was still fussing with the Soul Mill. ‘Maybe we should get out of here?’ he croaked. He had no idea what would happen when hundreds of trapped souls were freed from their prison, but he figured they wouldn’t want to be around.
Lucy seemed to be in agreement and reached across to help him to his feet, but they had only taken a couple of steps towards the door when the network of cracks in the Soul Mill reached critical mass. Danny had a split-second of warning as he saw Ray take a step back, covering his eyes.
‘Get down!’ he said, pushing them both to the floor.
On the surface of things, the explosion was fairly unspectacular. There was no bang, no sonic boom, just the sudden rattle of glass fragments hitting the walls and furniture. The way it felt, however, was something else entirely. Danny squeezed his eyes shut at a sudden pressure in his ears, as if he’d somehow risen thirty-six thousand feet then dropped again, all in a split second. His stomach turned itself in knots that had nothing to do with his recent diet of frozen pizza and whiskey. He rolled on his side and tried to focus on Lucy. From the look on her face, she was experiencing it too.
It made the macing feel like a refreshing spray of perfume.
‘Are you two okay?’ Nudge asked.
‘Yeah. You?’ Danny replied automatically, then felt foolish. His mouth had filled with a metallic taste and he couldn’t tell if he’d bitten his tongue or if it was some side effect of the mill explosion.
‘It’s just lucky that ghosts can’t shit themselves.’
They looked across the workshop. Ray had been in the direct path of the explosion. Danny could see that his entire left side glittered with broken glass and blood.
‘Ray!’ Lucy called. She went to move towards him, but Danny gripped her by the elbow.
‘No. Look,’ he said, pointing at the remnants of the mill.
The bottom bulb had shattered completely and the top one now lay in its remnants, cracked open like a chocolate egg halfway through Easter Sunday. But this wasn’t what drew Danny’s attention. It should be impossible for anyone to appear only inches tall when stepping out of the bulb, only to be fully grown when their feet touched the concrete of the workshop, but this is what happened to the young man who now stood over Ray’s prone form. Danny got the sense that he hadn’t grown, rather that he had just taken a single stride from a long way off. He was, or had been, a wiry man in his early twenties, dressed in navy tracksuit bottoms and a red T-shirt. Danny was pretty sure that he’d recently used the new arrival’s tracksuit top to extricate himself from the zip ties. ‘Anto?’ he called out.
The young man didn’t react, his focus entirely on the groaning Ray on the floor. Anto looked different to Nudge and the other ghosts he’d seen so far. He was barely an outline, as if the time spent in the Soul Mill had drained him of whatever gave spirits substance. Danny could make out the partially smashed figure of a glass ballerina on the shelf by looking through the man’s head.
Anto was suddenly joined by another man, this one tall and bald, dressed in a black suit. Then, a red-haired woman in nurse’s scrubs; a little boy no older than eight, in his pyjamas. Then, another young man, this one in a hospital gown. The room rapidly began to fill up with incorporeal bodies. They didn’t bother with the niceties of observing physical space. As more and more of them arrived, they stood with the top halves of their torsos sticking out of a workbench or with one side of their bodies hidden by the wall of the garage. As they continued to fill the room, it became increasingly difficult to tell where one ghost ended and another began.
As the space filled up, Danny, Nudge and Lucy backed away towards the open door.
‘Raymond!’ Lucy called out again.
They could barely see Ray now through the thickening fog of spirits surrounding him. But Lucy’s shout seemed to wake him from whatever daze he’d been in following the explosion of the mill because he pushed himself up with his good arm and surveyed the crowd of spirits around him in horror.
Danny wanted to run, to leave all of this behind, to move to some foreign country and never to speak of any of it again for the rest of his life, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. Lucy made another attempt to move to her husband’s side, but Danny kept a grip on her arm.
With grim determination, Ray managed to pull himself to his feet, using the rack beside him for leverage. The crowd of spirits was so thick now that Danny felt as if he was watching it play out underwater, like they were at the bottom of some terrible sea. Ray looked like hell. One side of his face was a ruin of gashes and embedded shards of glass. He held his injured arm to his side as he surveyed the throng.
Danny hadn’t known what to expect from his attacker. Bargaining maybe? Pleading for mercy? He certainly hadn’t expected rage.
‘Well!?’ he roared at the assembly of the dead. ‘What are you waiting for? An apology?’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘As if any of you wouldn’t have done the same thing, or worse, given the opportunity to get a few more years.’ This last word was angrily hissed, as saliva and blood flecked from his lips. He somehow managed to stand up to an approximation of his full height. ‘“For the living know that they will die; But the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward; For the memory of them is forgotten,”’ Ray recited.
Danny was fairly sure that this was a quote from somewhere but whether it was from the Bible or some old movie he didn’t know.
Ray raged on. ‘That’s you. The forgotten. The departed. Nothing more than names on stone.’ He whipped around to focus on where Danny and Lucy were still huddled. ‘I refused to become one of them. Another sad old fart who rotted away slowly. I beat death!’ This last statement was bellowed but it seemed to use up the last of his righteous energy and he slumped back down as blood continued to soak into his white polo. ‘So, you can all just get fucked.’
Danny wasn’t sure which of them moved first, or if it was some sort of unspoken group effort, but the mass of spirits closed the gap around the Soul Miller. Unfortunately, their washed-out transparency still allowed Danny and Lucy to witness what happened next. Danny had seen the part in the Indiana Jones film where the Nazi scientist chose poorly, his face melting like candlewax. This was nothing like that. In fact, any film or TV show where a character aged rapidly seemed to have several glaring, factual errors as far as he was concerned. For one thing, they didn’t include the grinding, popping noise of a skeleton experiencing six decades of arthritis and osteoporosis at once. The scream that they over-dubbed didn’t suddenly lower in pitch as the vocal cords atrophied. Most of all, Hollywood had failed to accurately capture the look of horror in the suddenly rheumy eyes of the victim.
The ghostly mob drew back suddenly. Danny didn’t know how Ray had looked immediately before he’d switched on the Soul Mill, but he guessed that it wasn’t like this. Nobody could look like this and still be walking around. The newly freed souls had returned his stolen decades with interest. His blond hair had disappeared entirely, except for a few colourless wisps that clung on at the sides. The process hadn’t given him any of his weight back, but this just served to make his frame seem even more skeletal. It did seem to have healed the lacerations from the glass explosion but, while they were no longer bleeding freely, they now presented as a patchwork of pockmarked scars that ran down the entire side of his face and arm.
Lucy screamed. Danny didn’t blame her. He was just about clinging to his own stomach contents. The noise caused her husband to turn his head towards them but, even at this distance, Danny could see that his eyes were shrouded in the near-total milky film of cataracts.
The skeletal figure of Raymond Brooks took one hesitant step forward on shaky legs and then, letting out a last rasping sigh, collapsed forward onto the cement floor of his workshop.
Danny was mildly surprised that he didn’t crumble to dust upon impact.
‘Jesus, fuck!’ Nudge said, accurately gauging the feeling in the room.
Lucy called her husband’s name again but there was little doubt that he hadn’t so much shuffled off this mortal coil as been fired off it out of a cannon.
Danny had really hoped that the ghostly horde would move on once they’d gotten their revenge on their jailer, but the room still heaved with them. It was very difficult to tell since he couldn’t make out individual faces, but they seemed to have turned their attention to the two remaining living people in the room.
Lucy was still fighting to get to her now-late husband and Danny whispered urgently in her ear. ‘Lucy, they’re not finished yet. We have to get you out of here.’
At this, she seemed to finally grasp the danger she was in. They turned towards the door, only to find that there were more spirits behind them. There were hundreds of them now, radiating from where the Soul Mill had stood. Danny could see them out in the garden, the weak winter sunlight warping and flickering through them as they moved.
‘Try apologising,’ Danny whispered urgently. His throat felt like it might seize up.
‘What?’
‘Tell them you’re sorry,’ Nudge urged.
‘But I didn’t know?’
‘Good. Try starting with that,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry! I didn’t know what it was doing!’ Lucy yelled tearfully at the assembled masses.
There was no reaction. Danny realised that he was shivering, and not just from fear. It was suddenly freezing in the small workshop. Lucy was trembling too.
‘What is happening?’ Danny had never felt this cold, not even the night on the canal. It felt like his bones had been replaced by bands of freezing iron.
‘I think it’s them,’ Lucy said.
Danny realised that their breath wasn’t crystalising in front of their faces, as they spoke. Whatever he was feeling it had nothing to do with the actual temperature.
If it feels like this now, what will happen when they actually swarm us?
‘What now?’ Nudge asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Danny stammered back, through chattering teeth. ‘You’re free!’ He shouted at their silent audience. ‘You can cross over now.’
‘That’s not how it works,’ Lucy said.
‘Well, why the fuck not?’ Danny asked petulantly. ‘The stupid fucking mill thing is gone. They can go wherever they want now.’
‘They’re too far gone to understand. They’re hardly more than echoes of themselves.’
‘I thought you said that that process takes years?’ Nudge said, panic edging into his voice.
‘It does. Whatever that thing did to them seems to have accelerated it. I’m not sure they even know how to cross over anymore.’
‘Is there something you can do?’ Danny asked.
‘Like what?’
‘What about a Spirit Lock?’
‘There’s too many of them and not enough . . .’ she trailed off and whirled suddenly towards Nudge. ‘You could do it!’
‘What!?’ Danny and Nudge replied in stereo.
‘The Spirit Lock, the spell, it’s not the blood or the writing, not really,’ she said hurriedly. ‘That’s just a way to make the words have an impact on the other side. It’s the words, the sacrifice that matters.’
‘I can’t bleed,’ Nudge said.
‘It doesn’t need to be that kind of sacrifice.’ She was speaking more quickly now. ‘By performing the ritual, you would essentially be locking them out of the spirit realm; it would force them to cross over but . . .’
‘But what?’ Danny asked. His head felt like it was filled with snow. The conversation seemed to be happening a long way away.
‘Because he’s a spirit himself. It works both ways. They would be locked out and Nudge would be locked in. He wouldn’t be able to cross over. At least, not naturally.’
‘What!? Fuck that!’ Danny said. He eyeballed the distance to the doorway. It was only a few feet away but there were dozens of ghosts in the intervening space and God only knew how many in the garden outside. ‘Nudge, don’t listen to her. We’re going to make a break for it,’ he said.
‘Are you out of your mind!?’ Nudge asked.
Maybe if we move fast enough then we can escape the worst of it with only a decade or so piled onto us, Danny thought. He ran his hand through his hair reflexively. Might as well kiss the hairline goodbye now.
‘What happens to these people, the ghosts, if I don’t show them how to cross over?’ Nudge asked.
‘Nudge, don’t even think about—’ Danny started.
‘—What happens?’ he insisted.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lucy, in a small voice. Shivering, in her camel-hair coat, she suddenly looked much younger. ‘They’re so far gone already. I don’t know if they could ever find their way back.’
Nudge nodded once, face set. ‘Let’s do it.’
Danny stepped forward, suddenly heedless of the press of spirits. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s like she said,’ Nudge told him. ‘It’s the only way to make sure you’re safe and that these people can cross over.’
‘But you’ll be stuck here. Maybe forever,’ Danny said.
‘We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,’ Nudge replied. ‘Ian is in there somewhere. So is Adella, Anto, Jimmy and maybe hundreds of others. I can’t leave them like this.’
‘It doesn’t have to be you—’ Danny started.
‘—Shut up and listen!’ he interrupted. ‘I can never begin to repay you for how you’ve helped me these last few weeks. But I’m the one who got us into this and I’m going to be the one to get you out.’ He turned to Lucy. ‘How do we do this?’
Their circle of ghost-free real estate had rapidly dwindled to the point that Lucy and Danny looked as if they were trying to occupy the same space. She poked her head around Danny’s shoulder. ‘Just repeat after me.’
He nodded and she started. Danny wanted to interrupt, to keep them from doing this, to suggest some alternative. But he had none. The surrounding press of ghosts seemed to be leaching away his ability to think and Lucy was already chanting. Nudge was repeating everything she was saying phonetically. Phoenician didn’t seem like the easiest language – very few vowels – but she wasn’t correcting him, so clearly Nudge was doing okay.
The ghosts stopped mere inches from them as they stared. Danny could make out individual faces now, but none had any expression. Not anger, not sorrow, just blankness. Danny shivered and turned his attention back to Nudge and Lucy. They seemed to be working faster than she had at the pub. Maybe the ritual was more potent in the spirit realm? he thought. Whatever the reason, they were soon reaching a crescendo. Lucy shouted the last few words, her voice cracking with the strain and Nudge repeated them at a yell.
For a beat, there was silence. There didn’t seem to be any noticeable difference to the horde of ghosts.
‘Lucy? Why aren’t they leaving?’ Danny asked softly, afraid that any sound might cause them to surge.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Maybe we did it wrong.’
‘Hey, what’s this “we” business? I just repeated after you,’ Nudge protested with his usual lack of a sense of priorities.
‘Right. Okay,’ Danny said hollowly, ‘We make a break for it.’ He pushed down the gnawing thought that Nudge may have just sentenced himself to an eternity as a ghost for nothing. ‘On the count of three,’ he said, bouncing on his toes trying desperately to get some life back into his dead limbs.
Lucy looked as if she was about to protest but then simply nodded.
‘One,’ he said.
Had Lucy left the back door open? We don’t want to be slowed down once we get out there.
‘Two.’
If we have to, we could dive through the sliding glass door.
‘Danny, wait!’ Lucy shouted.
He was snapped out of his planning and looked to where she was pointing. It took him a second to figure it out. More and more space was opening up between them and the front ranks of ghosts. Danny thought that they were retreating at first, but, after a moment’s inspection, he saw that wasn’t the case. Those closest to the front were just disappearing. It was difficult to see at first, because of how densely they were packed, but the more he looked, the more he saw that, like some sort of supernatural chain reaction, the spirits closest to them were thinning out and eventually disappearing entirely.
