Poor Jacky, page 7
“See you,” thought Carol. “Dotty old bat.”
She remembered the dotty old bat’s retirement party years ago. Were it not for her departure, she, Carol, would not have been promoted.
“Loose ends...” Carol patted an empty shelf with her fingers.
Storage... She knew full well what that meant. The old school basement. Even darker and more dingy than the boarded-up rooms above. Oh well, strike while the iron’s...
She crossed the room to a cupboard from which she withdrew an overall. Buggered if I’m going to get muck on my cardigan, she scowled. She retrieved a torch and checked it for batteries. She winced as she shone a beam of light into her own face.
She wasn’t fond of going down to Storage. It was the spiders more than anything. They seemed to love it down there and somehow found enough sustenance to thrive. She wished she had a hat to protect her hair from cobwebs. Or worse: the actual creatures themselves.
Oh, where was Danny when you needed him? She could have sent him down there, no problem. Bloody part-timers.
She left the archives and entered a narrow corridor that led to the staff room and kitchen on one side and to the cellar door on the other. She unhooked the key to the cellar from its hook. It was a substantial, hefty piece of metal, a thing of beauty in itself. You could squish a good many spiders with it, before they rose up and overwhelmed you...
Cool it, Carol, she admonished herself. Don’t give yourself the heebie-jeebies or you’ll never get down there.
She unlocked the door, almost wrenching her wrist as the key turned the stubborn tumblers. A waft of cold, stale air rushed out to greet her. Carol grimaced. She reached around the wall, fumbling for the light switch.
Gloves!
She fumbled her hands into a pair of latex gloves. If I have to squish any eight-legged bastards, I won’t get any of their gunk on me.
She began her slow progress down the wooden slatted staircase. She had to duck to avoid bashing her head on the bare light bulb suspended from the ceiling. It had been colonised by the arachnids. Old cobwebs, grey with dust, festooned it and its fitting, like strings of tinsel.
Carol shuddered; she was glad to get out from under the light bulb before anything had the chance to drop on her head.
The floor was uneven, making the shelves loom at odd angles. Carol always felt they were going to pounce on her. She made her way through them, casting the beam of her torch in all directions, on the lookout for spiders waiting in ambush. She passed beneath an arch of red bricks to the furthest recesses of the cellar. Here there were fewer shelves. Most of the documents languished in boxes and crates, mouldering and forgotten. Old Beamish had never got around to sorting and archiving this little lot, Carol pouted. May as well have left them where she found them.
She shone her light on a heap of cardboard boxes, collapsing with damp in a corner. Beamish’s scrawl, in black marker pen, declared them to be from D. Hall.
Hoo-bloody-rah! Carol thought. But there were so many of them - she didn’t fancy sifting through them down there. With a bit more notice, she could have had Danny ferry them upstairs. Let him disturb the spiders and the silverfish.
The unmistakable sound of laughter made Carol freeze. She held her breath. For one crazy moment she thought the spiders had taught themselves how to laugh.
She straightened and turned around. The beam of light darted all around her.
“Hello?” she called out, her voice husky in her dry mouth.
A pattering sound: footsteps!
Carol spun on the spot. Her torch flickered. She shook it and swore.
The laughter came again. Closer this time. High-pitched and child-like.
“Who’s there?” Carol spun again. The torch sputtered out, plunging her into darkness.
“Bloody ...”
She smacked the torch with the heel of her hand and then twisted its base. It flared up in one last burst of light, revealing the bright face of a grinning child right in front of her.
Carol screamed.
The torch went out.
***
With four pints sloshing around inside him, Paul returned to the archives department to find an ambulance straddling the kerb. Its lights were flashing as a warning but it didn’t stop the neighbours peering through their curtains or gawking from their doorsteps. Paul shuffled along in that inefficient motion between walking and running. A woman at her front door caught his eye.
“Another one!” she sounded bored. “Thought all that business was done with.”
Paul stopped shuffling and asked her what she meant.
“Oh, there was ambulances coming here like nobody’s business at one time. Forever having accidents - the people, not the ambulances. Well, they’re not normal, are they? Forever with their heads in a book. Need to watch where they’m going.”
“What are you talking about?”
The woman bridled at this and gave Paul a cold appraisal.
“You’re not from around here,” she diagnosed. “You should look up local history, love. Hey, this is the best place for it.”
She cackled at her own humorous observation and then stretched her neck to look beyond him; the interview was over.
Paul nodded and hurried away. There was that receptionist one, standing by the gatepost, sniffling into a tissue. Paramedics were carrying a stretcher to the open doors of the ambulance. There was a woman on the stretcher, alive but staring blankly. If her hair hadn’t been white before, it certainly was now.
“What’s happened?” Paul asked the receptionist.
Rebecca patted at her wet nostrils and wailed.
Other members of staff, blinking like unearthed moles in the daylight, steered her back indoors. Paul tried to follow. A stare from a corpulent man in waistcoat and cardigan warned him off.
“It’s okay,” Rebecca sniffed. “He’s a writer.”
Paul didn’t quite see how this changed anything but moments later he found himself in the staff room, nursing a vending-machine cuppa that could have been cocoa or could have been soup. Or both.
“We thought it had all stopped,” the receptionist told him, “Thought it had all settled down. Carol must have disturbed him when she went down to find the stuff for you. This is all your fault!”
She collapsed into wracking sobs. Paul waited until they subsided.
“I don’t understand. My fault? Who did Karen disturb?”
“CAROL!”
“Who did Carol disturb?”
The receptionist stared at him with red-rimmed eyes. Then she glanced around as if checking no one was within earshot. She leant closer to him and whispered.
“Poor Jacky.”
***
The name meant nothing to Paul but he was soon to learn all there was to know about this Poor Jacky. Rebecca set him up at a monitor in the search room and the waistcoated, becardiganed fellow, whose name was Geoff, brought ledgers and microfiche binders but mostly, perched on the table and told Paul everything he knew.
“Started twenty-odd years ago,” Geoff scratched his goatee, “um, twenty-five to be precise.” He consulted a battered notebook in which the employees were obliged to record any and all accidents in the workplace. “Box dropped on foot before it got over the threshold. A fall down the stairs. A fallen light fixture...
“And then, what’s not written in the accident book, is all the sightings. But, worry you not, they’re all burned indelibly in here.” Geoff prodded his temple.
“Sightings of...” Paul prompted.
“The child,” Geoff said with emphasis. “A little boy. Looking like he’d stepped out of that painting, you know the one? Gainsborough? The Blue Boy?”
Paul made a vague expression that could have gone either way. He made a note to look it up later.
“And this boy is Poor Jacky?”
Geoff was alarmed. He cast a panicked look around the room.
“Keep your voice down!”
He waited, holding up a finger to stop Paul from speaking further. After a moment, he relaxed.
“We prefer to call him the child,” he went on, “to be on the safe side. We think he moved in here along with all the papers from Dedley Hall. That’s why they haven’t been properly archived. People are reluctant to touch them, in case they wake him up. You might think this is all ridiculous and I wouldn’t blame you if you did. But I’ve seen things. I’ve fallen foul of the child myself.”
“Oh?”
Geoff nodded. He extended his thumb and held it out so it caught the light from the monitor.
“See that scar? Got jammed in a stapler back in 97. Bled like buggery.”
Paul squinted at it. He couldn’t see anything.
He was ready to dismiss all this as a load of bollocks and a complete waste of his time but he remembered what he had seen: the ‘child’ and what had happened to Steven and the others...
Perhaps he was in some way responsible. Packing up those papers had stirred the - the what? - the ghost; he should consider himself lucky to have escaped...
He realised the archivist was clicking his fingers in front of Paul’s face.
“You drifted off a bit there,” Geoff rolled his eyes. “Writers, eh!”
“You mentioned all this had stopped. When?”
“Hard to say for sure. It was terrible to start with but gradually it settled down. And then it would flare up again and then would fizzle out. I suppose it all stopped - up until today’s mishap, of course - when the old bird left.”
“The old bird?”
“Beamish. Retired. She was the chief archivist of the borough.”
“Ah...”
Paul wrote the name in his notebook and circled it twice.
“You think there is a connection between this Beamish woman and the, um, child?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Geoff muttered. “But then not much surprises me these days.”
“I knew her,” Paul decided it was better to come clean.
“You do surprise me!” Geoff gasped. “You knew the old bird?”
“I worked for her, actually. Long time ago. I was a temp in the library during my student days.”
“Oh, well, I didn’t realise.” Geoff seemed to be looking at Paul in a different light.
“In fact, I was at the Hall for a few days, helping to pack up.”
Geoff suddenly got to his feet. He stepped away from the writer as though he was contaminated.
“Then all this is you! This is your doing! You’ve come here and you’ve woke him up!”
“What?”
“You’ll have to leave. Go on; it’s closing time anyway. Please don’t come back.”
He shut down the computer and gathered up the ledgers, deaf to Paul’s protestations. The archivist strode over to the exit and held it open. He refused to meet Paul’s gaze as the writer went out.
Paul stepped blinking in the sunshine. The door was closed so quickly behind him it almost hit his backside.
What the fuck?
A little dazed, he stood gaping like a landed fish. He found his way back to the pub for a restorative shot of whisky and to contemplate this latest development. He took out his mobile and was about to call Rick when the thing burst into Beethoven’s Fifth and his agent’s scowling face filled the screen. Panicking, Paul fumbled the phone, dropping it to the carpet. He ducked under the table, aware that the music was attracting glares of disapproval from the other drinkers. He retrieved the device and pressed ‘Decline’. Straightening up he banged his head on the underside of the table.
His agent had that effect on him.
He bought another whisky as an analgesic.
He couldn’t ignore Judy’s calls forever. He could imagine all too clearly the diatribe that was coming his way. His irresponsibility. The necessity of resuming the book tour. The vital importance of taking his medication.
He swigged the last of the amber liquid from his glass. That was all the medication he needed. Fuck the citalopram. It impeded his ability to write; why couldn’t Judy see that?
“But Paul darling,” she would wheedle, “you need to stick with it. You need to keep your demons at bay.”
They had had the conversation many times. When he was holed up at home on a writing jag, the words and ideas pouring out of him, he would go months without popping a pill. Judy didn’t complain then, did she? And when the fruits of these labours topped the bestseller charts online and at all major retailers, she didn’t give a monkey’s about his meds then, did she? It was only when he was out and about in the real world that she became all maternal - no, not maternal. Governess-like.
Bah.
Paul considered a third whisky but thought better of it. He made the call to Rick.
“Wow, heavy,” was Rick’s response to Paul’s news. “Listen: I’ve been digging into that archivist you told me about, that Beamish woman...”
“And?”
“I think I’ve found her.”
***
Rick’s car pulled up opposite the Dorothy Beaumont Rest Home, a bright building of pastel-colours; its cheerful exterior was at odds with the rather dour atmosphere inside.
“I’ve got it all figured out,” the younger man said as he locked the car. “We’ll say you want to give a talk, a reading or something. That will get us in. And then, after the talk or reading or whatever, you can offer to do a signing. Then you’ll be able to single out your Miss Beamish from the herd and have a quick word.”
Paul stared at him.
“You should write fiction,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “I’m just going to ask to see her.”
Moments later, the author and the barman were perched on armchairs in a common room. The heating was on full despite the clemency of the weather and their noses were assailed by the smell of disinfectant and boiled cabbage with undernotes of piss.
Presently, a care worker came in, pushing a wheelchair before her, bashing it against the door frame.
“Here we are!” she announced cheerfully, as though she had just burst out of an enormous cake. She stood beside the wheelchair grinning inanely.
If she thinks I’m tipping her...thought Paul. He chose to ignore the carer and focus on the occupant of the chair.
Wasted and yellowed with age, like an old document, it was definitely the Miss Beamish of yesteryear. The thick spectacles were the same. The haughty stare. The cheekbones were more prominent above the sunken cheeks.
“Miss Beamish...” Paul almost gasped in greeting.
Eyebrows raised above the spectacle frames. The head turned to the simpering careworker.
“That’s all right, Keeley; you may leave us.”
The girl seemed disappointed to be dismissed. She bobbed her head in farewell and slunk away. Miss Beamish turned her piercing eyes towards Paul.
“You can piss off,” she said.
***
It took all the powers of persuasion Paul could muster to convince Miss Beamish to hear him out. She watched him like a cat waiting for a mouse to tire itself out. Then she laced her fingers on her lap and contorted her thin lips into something between a pout and a smile.
“I knew you’d be back,” she snapped. “What took you so long?”
“Uh...” The question took Paul by surprise.
“Mr Beecroft has been very busy forging his career,” Rick offered. Miss Beamish turned her steely stare towards him.
“Who’s this? Your catamite?” She was gratified to see the faces of both men redden. She took advantage of their embarrassment and consternation and made a speech of her own.
“I remember you; of course, I remember you. And I remember that night at the Hall. You may think that what happened there on that night was a delusion, your mind playing tricks, a hallucination brought about by alcohol, glue-sniffing or marijuana-smoking or whatever it was you kids were up to at the time. But I’m here to tell you what happened, happened. Your friends did not simply go missing, as was reported to the police, as has been believed ever since. Your friends died that night in Dedley Hall. You know it and I know it, but who could we tell? Who would believe us?
“For my own part, I would have liked to have given their families some kind of assurance. Better to know for definite than to be left hanging and hoping. But of course, I could not breathe a word. And neither could you.
“But now you are back, digging into the past. I am - I was - an archivist for over forty years, Mr Beecroft; I know the difference between preserving the past and archaeology.” She leaned forwards and raised a bony finger. “Do not dig up the past, Mr Beecroft. You, I and the rest of Dedley will regret it.”
Rick’s jaw was hanging open.
“Cool,” he breathed. It was just like being in a Beecroft novel.
“I - I don’t want to dig anything or anyone up, Miss Beamish,” Paul, the colour now drained entirely from his face, protested. “I just want to understand.”
The old woman nodded. Her head seemed too large and too heavy for her scrawny, withered neck.
“You want peace of mind. I can understand that. But think of the life you have had, Mr Beecroft. I have followed your career - in this town it is almost impossible to ignore it. Local lad becomes celebrated writer of horror stories. You have done rather well for yourself out of your disquiet, haven’t you? If your mind is put at ease, provided of course that could ever be possible, would you not lose the remarkable power of your imagination? Are you willing to risk it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about...”
The eyes pinned him to the spot.
“Yes, you do.”
Paul forced himself to look away. Rick was puzzled and asked what she was talking about.
“Kindly wheel me back to my room,” Miss Beamish released him from her gaze. “I have something that will be of interest.”
Paul and Rick scrambled to steer the chair. Paul deferred to the younger man and skipped ahead to open the door.
Miss Beamish gave directions but other than that they moved in silence along the overheated corridors. The colourful posters advertising Bingo and beetle drives only served to make the place seem more depressing.
