Nobody True (23 page)

“Please don’t leave us.” It was the desperate reedy voice of the medium. “Your loved ones are waiting to hear from you. Andrew, tell me what’s wrong so that I can reassure you. We are all as one in this room and wish you no harm.”

Distracted, I turned to her, and when I looked back at the apparitions, they were all but gone, just dispersing mists. Except for one.

I wasn’t sure if it had stood its ground, or if it was a new spirit, freshly arrived at the séance and had not yet become aware of my presence. But that couldn’t be, because he was looking directly at me.

There was something familiar about him and I suddenly realized why: he was the spook I’d noticed on the small rise at my funeral. He had been familiar then, but still I could not remember how I knew him. If alive, he would have been just past middle age, somewhere in his middle or late forties, because there was knowledge in his eyes, and experience in his features. His hair was full but almost colourless, and he wore a suit, a little crumpled, but not shabby; he also had on a white shirt with a dark tie (his suit and tie were too vague to suggest any other colour than grey). I knew this man. I knew this man.

A warmth denied to me since my demise emanated from him. I lost my own trepidation, if not my astonishment, as I watched the spectre become clearer, grey flushing to weak colours, the image itself more clearly rendered. I saw that his tie was red, his suit brown.

He smiled—at me—and the warmth engulfed me. His mouth opened to speak.

But the voice came from behind me.

“Jimmy.”

It wasn’t his voice, for it was female, high-pitched and querulous. I looked back at the medium once again as she spoke my name three times.

“Jimmy… Jimmy… Jimmy…”

I hadn’t been called that since I was a child.

“You must listen to me.”

Too surprised to know where to look now, my eyes went from sitters to ghost, ghost to sitters. The medium’s mouth moved again and I noticed her lips were wet with spit.

“You must go back, Jimmy,” she said and only then did it dawn on me that the apparition was talking to me through the bird-like woman, whose hands remained flat on the velvet cloth, her end-fingers still in contact with other hands around the table. It was her voice, yet it wasn’t quite the same as before when she had called to the spirit named Andrew. For some reason breath vapour was emerging from her mouth with the words, as if the temperature in the room had suddenly sunk dramatically, something I couldn’t actually feel myself.

The other sitters were looking at each other with perplexed expressions.

“Who’s Jimmy?” I heard one of them ask. There was a general shaking of heads, a few negative murmurs.

“I’m Jim—he means me,” I said, perhaps hoping that the medium, with her sensing powers, might hear me.

It was plain that she didn’t, for her head rolled round her shoulders, the pupils of her pale-blue eyes disappeared up into her head; she froze, her back arched, her scrawny neck stretched to its limit. For a moment, I thought she might topple, but her hands remained firmly on the tabletop.

“She can’t hear you, Jimmy.” The words came from the same source, the medium herself, but I knew they were from the ghostly man behind me. Turning directly to him, I saw his eyes were still on me, the woman a mere conductor for his message. Shapes cowered at his back, the other ghosts wavering in image and, apparently, wavering with fear also; I could feel it emanating from them. I should have been the one to be afraid and I couldn’t help but shake my head at the anomaly, even though I wasn’t quite without fear myself.

“What… who are you?” I asked, hardly expecting a reply—I’d become too used to being ignored nowadays.

There was a tenderness in his smile. I saw that his eyes were blue, his hair brown but greying. I knew this man.

“That doesn’t matter for now,” I heard the medium say over my shoulder, but the man’s lips forming the words. “You must go back, Jimmy. You must go back and stop him. Many others will die if you don’t.”

“Stop who? D’you mean Oliver, the friend who murdered me?”

A look of dismay swept over his ghostly features. “No. The one who lives in shadows, the one whose soul is black. You’ve already met this person, Jimmy, you must put an end to these murders. Find the person who has no face again.”

Somehow I knew instantly who he meant even before the medium spoke.

“The one with the scissors,” she said, while the apparition formed the words.

The man who clipped news stories from the papers. The man who lived in the gloomy basement flat. The man with the horribly disfigured face. Rather, the man without a face.

“No.” It was a one-word refusal from me. No way did I want to visit that grotesque again. Leave him undisturbed. Leave him to his own obsessions. Even though I was beyond harm these days, the thought of returning to that dark pit repulsed me.

“You must bring this evil to an end, Jimmy. The murder and defilement must stop.”

I was confused. Mutilation. The killer who I first blamed for my death. The man with the scissors.

“But there’s nothing I can do,” I cried out loud. “I’m… I’m a ghost, like you.”

“No. You’re not yet that. In time, Jimmy, in…” The medium’s voice was growing softer, the vision before me, and the cowering shapes behind it, beginning to fade.

“Your time will come, but first…”

The sound fading as the ghostly figure dematerialized before my eyes.

“The power…” his words were waning, dying, then reviving as if a volume control was being manipulated “… others here… afraid of you… the link… ting weak… visit you… one… time… this is over. Take heart… must be strong… your family… danger…”

The image—and the voice—was gone, dissolved in front of me. I heard a muted thump and someone shrieked. Wheeling round, I saw that the medium had fallen forward, her head hitting the table. One of the sitters, the plump woman I think, had cried out at the drama.

I stared into the shadowy corner, but there was nothing to see anymore, no fading remnants, no indication whatsoever that the ghosts had truly been there. A memory came to me then, suddenly, without prethought. I had seen the ghost who had spoken to me before, but it was many years ago and almost buried by time. I remembered when I had crashed my motorbike at the age of seventeen. I had left my body as a result of the trauma and had observed misty figures watching my unconscious body in the gutter. And I thought of one in particular, one who had tried to speak to me, but either his power or my receptiveness was not strong enough for his words to be clear. He had seemed familiar to me then and I couldn’t understand why at the time. I did now, though.

That man had been the same one who had appeared to me moments before in this clairvoyant’s parlour, the ghost who had spoken to me. I understood beyond any doubt now that this was my father.

26

So that’s why I returned to the horrible dingy basement flat somewhere in west London. It was easy to do, even if I hadn’t wanted to go: I just envisaged it in my mind, and then I was flying, the streets below me almost a blur. Within a few seconds, I was there, in the dimly lit room that had shadows darker than the séance parlour I’d just left. The hideously disfigured man was at home.

I find it difficult to express the consternation and nausea I felt the moment I saw him hunched over his central table, because I was to see a lot worse subsequently, stuff that would revolt me even more. The bent man was feeding. But he was feeding through a straw, sucking up some pulverized mixture into the hole that should have been his face, the slurping-gurgling noise he made as sickening as the sight.

The clear plastic container from a blending machine stood close by on the table—a table whose top was still littered with old newspaper cuttings and a pair of long-bladed scissors, by the way—with only a few dregs of some sludgy liquid remaining. The rest of the murky brown porridge was in the bowl from which the hunched figure drank.

In his black shabby clothes, shoulders rounded and head bent low, he resembled a giant fly sucking through its proboscis, the shit-brown of the liquid compounding the illusion. Even though I was of no substance, I wanted to vomit. Nevertheless, I stayed with him. I could imagine the flat’s foul stench just by looking around at its shoddy state, the black fungi on certain parts of the walls and ceiling, the threadbare carpet, and the open cans of food left in the small kitchen’s sink next door, and for the first time I appreciated having no sense of smell. It was a queer situation to be in, and I mean that by location as well as intention: I had a world outside to explore (if I could work up the “interest”), so why contain myself to this nasty hovel when I could float through the wall and visit far more wholesome and entertaining places? But I remained there, not sure why I was obeying a ghost’s plea. A ghost who had mentioned my family… and danger…

The man with the scissors, the ghost of my father had said. Bring this evil to an end.

Was this hunched person the serial killer, then? Was he the one who had murdered and mutilated all those poor people? The killer Oliver had foolishly tried to emulate? And if not, why then had I been drawn to him in the first place, before the séance, before my father had had the chance to talk to me? This person’s interest in the murders, shown by the press clippings still in disarray on the table, indicated more than just morbid curiosity. It was crazy. I was—used to be—an ordinary man, with precious little regard for otherworldly matters, even though I had the ability to leave my own body at times, so what was I to believe now? I wanted to get out of there, away from this unfortunate but disgusting creature, my conscience chastizing me for such uncharitable thoughts, while my eyes implored me to flee. Besides, I had more interest in seeing Oliver brought to justice rather than this ogre. Selfish, I know, but I couldn’t get over my partner’s betrayal, first with my wife, then the ultimate treachery of murdering me.

I forced myself to linger. Even when this grotesque interrupted his feeding and his body, suddenly tense, looked around at me, I did not retreat. What harm could he do to me? I was already dead. It was freaky though, those coal-black eyes staring at me as if he knew I was there. I metaphorically held my breath and his gaze roamed further, searching the corners of his foul habitat. After a while, he returned to his noisy guzzling and I sighed with relief. But why was it that on both of the other occasions I’d come here he had seemed to sense my presence? What psychic powers did he have? Nobody else had been aware of me since my death, not even my close family—not even my mother—so why this man? Just more questions to the overall mystery of my predicament.*

*The fact that even the medium had been unable to see me created a new puzzle. She had been aware of the ghosts’ presence, had spoken to the one I believed to be my dead father, and he had spoken to me through her. Did that mean I wasn’t a proper ghost; even though there was no doubt that my body was dead? Hell, it had even been cremated! If I wasn’t a spirit, then what was I? Neither alive, nor a ghost; at least, apparently not in the true sense of the word. I feared I might be going mad.

I would wait, I decided. I would stay here for as long as I could stand it and see what evolved, loathsome though the ordeal might be. What the hell—I had nothing else to do. So I stayed with him through the night, watched him shamble around his tiny, three-roomed flat, saw him mull over his mass of newspaper clippings. He seemed vexed when he picked up the cutting concerning my own terrible demise, and then became angry, striking the tabletop with the heel of his fist several times. I could only assume that he was furious because someone appeared to have stolen his thunder and, having enjoyed the pleasure (the disfigured man must have got some kind of perverted kick out of slaying and mutilation, so would have assumed the copycat killer had experienced the same), this person had put the blame on him. He read the article over and over again and, to my horror, he underlined my home’s vague address with a stubby pencil. I felt a panic when I reasoned why he should do so. After a while, he sat up straight and pushed the clipping aside. He stared at the blemished wallpaper on the wall opposite, but his eyes seemed blank, as though he were not studying its faded patterns, but rather thinking inwardly, his eyes dulled as though they were matt-finished, the large cavity in his face oozing spittle and a yellowish pus-like substance that ran down his half-formed chin. I would have liked to have looked away from him, but somehow his deformity held me mesmerized. God, what had this man gone through in life? Had he been born with this deep wound where his nose and mouth should have been, or had some tragic accident occurred to render him so? What kind of world did he live in? What mental torment he must have been through. Did he have an occupation, or did his deformity force him to hide away permanently, venturing out only with his hat and scarf concealing his lack of normal features? And was it the ugliness in his face that had caused the ugliness in his soul? I almost felt sorry for him, but quickly remembered he was a killer who had chopped up the bodies of his victims.

Perhaps it was odd that never for a moment did I doubt that he was the serial killer the police were looking for, but everything about him—his interest in the newspaper clippings concerning the murders, the dark aura that surrounded him, even the black brooding atmosphere of the flat itself—indicated to me that there was something very wrong with this man and it had nothing to do with his deformity. And when he shuffled over to a corner cupboard and took out something wrapped in rough cloth my curiosity was roused further. Something, or things, clicked together as he laid the bundle on the table and unravelled it. Several long—about one-foot long—grey knitting needles lay exposed and I saw that their coated steel points had been honed into something lethal.