The Haunting of Emily Stone (20 page)

“Parts of it. It's kind of long-winded.”

“Right. Even
I
haven't quite read it all, I skipped some of the addenda. Whoever wrote it, they had a very dry style, but the basic information in that book, and the descriptions of the world inhabited by dead souls... It's remarkably similar to the things that Lizzie and Emily have been talking about.”

“So what do we do now?” Jenna asked. “Doug seems to think that whatever's out there, it's still coming after Emily.”

“I'm sure it is. We have to be ready for tonight.”

“Then I'm in,” she replied.

“Are you sure?”

“I didn't fly all the way back just to make coffee,” she pointed out. “I always knew... Well, that's not true. I always
hoped
that one day you'd get interested in this stuff again.” She paused, as if there was something else she wanted to say. “Maybe -”

“Jenna -”

“We should get back to Doug and the others,” she continued, interrupting him. “And... Have you seen the news today? Have you read
any
of the reports about Emily and Lizzie going missing?”

He shook his head. “To be honest, I've kind of been avoiding them.”

“Then I guess there's another part of this mess that you don't know about. Rob, something else happened last night. It's probably just a coincidence, but I think at the very least you need to tell Emily.”

***

“I don't know how to react,” Emily replied, staring at the floor with a hint of shock in her eyes. “Does that make me a bad person?”

“Not at all,” Robert told her. “We all grieve in our own way.”

“It's not like she was a candidate for Mother of the Year,” she continued, “but she was still... What exactly happened, again?”

“From what I read,” Jenna replied, “your mother died peacefully in her sleep at the nursing home.”

“They always say that, though, don't they?” Emily pointed out, sniffing back tears. “They want to spare the families.” She paused, before turning to Robert. “You don't think it could be connected to all of this, do you?”

“I don't see how,” he replied, “but we can't rule anything out at the moment. There's so much about this that we don't know.”

“The voice, the woman, the... whatever she is... She didn't mention my mother at all.”

“Then it probably
was
just a coincidence,” Jenna told her. “Had your mother been ill lately?”

“Only for the past decade or so,” Emily muttered with a faint, sad smile. “She was always complaining about aches and pains, but she talked a lot less once the dementia had really taken root. I remember once, she...” Pausing, she turned to Robert again. “One time, right at the start, when her symptoms were first showing, I asked her how it felt. She said it was as if someone was clawing at her mind, scraping away her memories and thoughts, almost as if they were trying to hollow out her skull from the inside. I guess it's at least possible that -”

“Let's not go down that avenue just yet,” Robert told her. “We need to focus on you and Lizzie.”

“She wasn't always the old harpy you met,” Emily continued. “You know what people are like, they tend to embrace stereotypes and start acting up, but I swear she could be...” She paused again, thinking back to the better times with her mother. “There was more to her. A lot more. Believe it or not, she could be kind and she could be caring, and she definitely wasn't the worst mother in the world. Obviously she made some bad decisions, but...”

“She was still your mother,” Jenna said after a moment, reaching out and putting a hand on Emily's shoulder. “I'm sorry for your loss.”

“But there'll be time for this later,” Emily replied, taking a deep breath as if she was trying to steel herself. “I can think about her tomorrow. Today we need to focus on this thing that's going to be coming after Lizzie and me. It's not going to give up, is it?”

“I doubt it,” Robert replied. “Not after all this time.”

“So what are we going to do?”

He paused for a moment. “The only thing we can do. Somehow, we're going to end it. Tonight.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Fifty-nine years ago

“Joyce! Stanley! Come on!”

Joyce and her brother Stanley both turned at the same time, looking out from under the rain-soaked awning and watching as their father waved at them from the doorway of a cafe.

“Move!” he shouted, before heading inside.

“I hate Blackpool,” Stanley muttered dourly.

“It's probably okay in summer,” Joyce replied, turning to him.

“We can't afford to come in summer,” he pointed out. “We can only afford to come in November. I'm freezing.”

“Me too.” Getting to her feet, she headed to the edge of the awning and watched as torrential rain pounded the small square in front of the cafe. For a moment, she felt as if she was in the most desolate place in the whole world, and when she looked up at the sky she found it hard to believe that the sun was still shining somewhere behind the thick clouds.

“We're gonna get soaked by the time we're halfway,” Stanley muttered, stopping next to her.

“Yep,” she replied.

“And for what? A sandwich in some grubby cafe.”

“It might be a nice sandwich.”

“You're an idiot.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out two bent, scuffed cigarettes. “I half-inched these from the car. Want one?”

She opened her mouth to turn him down, but suddenly he slipped one of the cigarettes into her hand and pulled a box of matches from his pocket.

“Stick it in your mouth,” he told her.

Doing as she was told, she watched him light a match and hold it up to the cigarette. Once it was lit, he did the same to his.

“Just breathe in slow,” he continued, “and -”

Before he could finish, she started coughing, and in the process she dropped the cigarette into a puddle.

“Idiot!” he hissed. “You've ruined it now!” As if to prove his point, he took a long, slow drag on his own and then breathed out.

“That stinks,” she replied, waving the smoke away.

“You'll get used to it. It's what grown-ups do.”

She paused for a moment. “Got any more?”

He smiled, before letting her try his. “Don't drop it,” he warned her.

She took a puff and, this time, she managed not to cough.

“I just want to hibernate,” he added. “Next winter, stick me in a box with some straw, and I'll sleep for six months. Like the neighbor's tortoise.”

“When I grow up,” Joyce replied, watching rain hitting the puddles as she took another drag on the cigarette, “I'm not going to have holidays in Blackpool. I'm going to have holidays in the sun, somewhere really exotic and hot.”

“How are you gonna afford that?”

“I'm gonna get a job, stupid.”

“You're a girl.”

“I'm still gonna get a job, and when I have a family of my own, and a rich husband, we're gonna go somewhere really posh and expensive for our holidays.”

“Whatever,” Stanley muttered, grabbing the cigarette from her. He took another drag, before pressing the tip against the wall to put it out and then slipping it back into his pocket. Ahead of them, the rain had intensified. “We'll have more later. You ready to do this?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” he replied. “Three. Two.” He paused. “One!”

Together, they ran out into the rain.

Twenty-four years ago

“So you're saying we can't sue any of them?” Joyce snapped, sitting on the stairs as she spoke to the lawyer over the phone. “Fat lot of good you are, then.”

Slamming the phone down, she lit another cigarette and took a long, slow drag. Looking over at the window, she realized it was raining again.

“Mummy?”

Turning, she saw that Emily was at the top of the stairs.

“I thought I told you to go to bed?”

“Who were you talking to?”

“Never mind. No-one.”

“You sounded angry.”

“I'll sound angrier in a minute if you don't sod off to bed.” She took another drag. “Go on, scram. You've got school in the morning.”

“But -”

“Bed!” she shouted. “Now!”

Once Emily had gone back to her room, Joyce hauled herself up and made her way to the front room. She grabbed a bottle of sherry and poured herself a glass, before flopping down on the sofa and taking a couple more drags on her cigarette. Leaning back, she closed her eyes for a moment and tried to empty her mind, while holding smoke in her mouth for as long as she could manage. Finally, slowly, she exhaled, and she opened her eyes to watch as the smoke rose up toward the ceiling.

“Fuckers,” she muttered finally. “People with money... They won't give us the time of day.”

Reaching over to the coffee table, she was about to check the
Radio Times
when she spotted the holiday brochures she'd picked up in town a few weeks earlier. Grabbing one, she flicked it open until she found the page with a turned-down corner. She'd gone through all the brochures carefully a few days earlier and finally she'd found a hotel in southern Majorca that looked absolutely perfect. Looking at the photos again, she saw the beautiful, large pool with its blue water glistening under the Mediterranean sun, and then she turned to the photos of a nearby beach, showing happy families playing together.

“One day, kid,” she whispered, flicking through a few more pages as she tried to imagine herself and Emily on a beach. “One bloody day.”

Chapter Thirty

Today

“This is it,” Robert said as he set the huge, delicate book on the table. “The Myrkia.”

“It smells,” Lizzie replied, taking a half-step back so she could watch from behind her mother.

“It positively stinks,” Robert added with a smile. “This thing spends most of its time locked away in one of the oldest libraries in the country. Seriously, it's a miracle Doug managed to persuade them to send it to us. The damn thing's worth in excess of five million pounds.”

“It's the only extant copy,” Douglas muttered, slipping his hands into a set of plastic gloves. “We believe around twenty were originally printed when it was published a few hundred years ago. Since then, the Myrkia has faded into obscurity, and most people would tell you that's a perfectly fine thing. As far as the academic world is concerned, the Myrkia is a curio at best, and a waste of time at worst.”

“So why's it relevant to us?” Emily asked, eying the book with suspicion. “I don't understand.”

“Almost everything you two have said to us,” Robert replied, “seems to reference events that are described in this book. The Myrkia was written by an anonymous Londoner who claimed to be receiving the text, word for word, from some kind of spirit that contacted him. He claimed that the spirit told him this was the true book of the dead, an account not only of what it's like to die, but also of the afterlife. Almost like a guidebook to some vast, lost world, the place souls end up when they die. Most people have dismissed the whole thing as a failed stunt.”

“You won't find many people studying this thing,” Douglas continued. “It's far too obscure.”

“The Myrkia describes the land of the dead in great detail,” Jenna explained. “Most accounts of such places tend to focus on a state of being, on the experience of being dead. The Myrkia is different. It catalogs a vast world with various different areas. There are rivers, mountains, valleys... even towns and cities. If you read this book, you get the impression that the world of the dead is just as rich and just as varied as the world of the living.”

“I still don't get how it's going to help
us
,” Emily replied.

“Mummy,” Lizzie whispered, “I'm scared. I don't like the book.”

“Here's the page,” Douglas said, opening the book and turning to Jenna. “It's right here.”

“Listen to this part,” Jenna continued, stepping closer to the book and looking down at the intricately handwritten, partially-faded and cracked pages. “There is only one way out of the dead place,” she read, “and that is through the souls of the living, for the souls of the living are as doorways to the souls of the dead. At the far eastern end of the dead place, there exists a wall, constantly shifting and changing with the souls of living people, who are stitched together in such a manner that they stretch far into the sky above. Those who wish to escape the dead place can be found massing at the base of this wall, trying to climb up so that they can find a particularly weak soul, through which they might be able to break back into the land of the living.”

“Those affected souls,” Douglas added, turning to Emily, “are said to be aware of this to some degree. Not in a tangible way, but more of a sensation.”

Emily felt a shiver run through her body. “So you're saying that one of these dead people climbed up a wall of souls until they reached... me?” She turned to Robert. “Why me?”

“Sheer bad luck,” he suggested. “You just happen to offer a way through.”

“Listen,” Jenna told them, still reading from the book. “Climbing the wall is not the work of a moment. It can take years for a dead soul to rise this way, and most will slip and fall, necessitating that they start again. Very few ever make it far enough, and their task is made more difficult by the fact that when one second passes in their world, whole days and even years pass in the land of the living. By the time a dead soul reaches its target, the target might be gone, since the soul might have passed on.”

“So that might explain why the ghost left you alone for so long,” Robert continued, turning to Emily. “It climbed up and tried to get through you when you were a girl. If it fell and had to climb again, maybe it has only just got back to where it was before.”

“And now it wants to break through me?” she asked.

“It would need to drag you through and take your place in the wall,” Jenna explained. “It would literally pull you into its world and then climb through. Without a body of its own, it would most likely manifest as a ghost. I assume that, at some point once it entered this world, its soul would be patched into the wall, taking your place and leaving you trapped in the world of the dead forever.”

“Or unless
you
managed to find another soul,” Douglas suggested. “One you, in turn, could break through.”

“This is insane,” Emily replied. “I thought it was just a ghost. You that know, someone who died and then they came back and started haunting the house.”

“If only it was that simple,” Robert muttered.

“The implications of this are profound,” Jenna added. “If this part of the Myrkia is correct, then...” She stared for a moment at the vast book. “There are more than a thousand pages here. What if they're
all
true? This book might be an A to Z to the entire dead world, it might be a kind of Rosette Stone that lets us understand what's really happening all around us.”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” Douglas warned her, “there's -”

“No,” Robert interjected, “let's
definitely
get ahead of ourselves. This is the most exciting thing that's happened to humanity in decades, maybe ever. We have to proceed with caution, but we also have a duty to push ahead and find out what the hell is really going on here.” He turned to Emily. “Besides, we have no choice. If we're right, this woman is going to try to get at you again tonight. She's desperate, she won't give up.”

“Is there any way of stopping her,” Emily asked, “or is it best if I just...” She looked down at Lizzie and saw the fear in the little girl's eyes.

“I don't know if we can stop her completely,” Robert replied, “but I think we can keep her away from you two.”

Emily turned back to him. “How?”

“It says right here,” he continued, pointing at the book. “A second in the dead place can equate to days, weeks, maybe even years here. If we can slow the creature down, maybe knock it back down the wall so that it has to climb again... By the time it gets back up to you, you could well be in your eighties, your nineties...”

“Or dead?” she suggested.

“Problem solved,” he pointed out.

“But then it'd just go after someone else.”

“Maybe by then we'll be able to communicate with it,” he continued. “It was a living person once, there's no reason to believe that it can't be reasoned with. Either way, we need to focus on keeping the pair of you safe, and right now this seems like the best option. We need to find some way to knock the creature back when it reaches through. It might be as easy as pushing a broom handle through, although I'd like to think that maybe we can make contact. Peace in our time, and so on.”

“With the dead?” Jenna asked.

“Why not?” He turned to her. “This creature, this woman, has apparently been nattering away to Emily and Lizzie for long enough, so obviously it's capable of an actual conversation. We might be able to reason with it, to learn from it, maybe even find a way to let it through without harming anyone.”

“You're not serious,” Douglas replied. “
Let it through?
You don't even know what it is!”

“It's a dead person,” he continued. “I hardly think it's some kind of evil creature from hell that's going to burn the planet to ashes. Everything we've seen so far suggests that it's something that simply wants to come back to the land of the living and, I don't know, feel the sun on its face again, something like that.”

“Mummy,” Lizzie said, tugging on Emily's arm. “I don't like this. Can we go?”

“I have to stay,” she replied, “but...” She turned to the others. “Lizzie doesn't need to be here.”

“I'd hesitate to take her away,” Robert told her. “This thing has already shown a willingness to use Lizzie to get to you. I wouldn't want to tempt it again, especially since you broke the agreement you made. It might be angry.”

“So we just have to wait?” Lizzie asked. “Last night it struck at around midnight.”

“Then maybe it'll be the same this time,” Jenna said. “All we can do is wire you up and hope for the best.”

“I want to talk to it,” Robert continued, looking down at the Myrkia for a moment. “Tonight we're going to make sure Emily and Lizzie are safe. Starting tomorrow, though, we're going to start using this book as a guide to help us explore whatever's out there.”

***

“Mummy,” Lizzie said a short while later, as they sat in Robert's office and waited for him to fetch them, “why can't we just run away?”

“This thing is just going to follow us,” Emily replied, reaching out and brushing the girl's hair back. “It's not haunting a house or a place. It's haunting me.”

“Why you?”

She forced a smile. “I guess I'm just lucky.”

“But it won't take you away, will it?”

“Take me away?”

Leaning forward, Lizzie put her arms around her mother. “I don't want it to take you where it took me,” she whispered. “I saw...”

Emily waited for her to continue. “You saw what, sweetheart?”

“I saw...” She paused. “I thought I saw Grandma.”

“When?”

“On the other side.”

“Last night?”

Lizzie nodded. “But I can't have done, can I? Because Grandma's in that home.”

“Your grandmother...” Pausing, Emily realized that maybe it was time to tell her about Joyce's death. In the rush of the day so far, she'd been more than willing to push all thoughts of her own mother out of the way, and she'd told herself that she'd focus on that point some other time. “What exactly did you see Grandma doing?” she asked finally.

“I didn't tell the man because I was scared,” she continued, “but... When I was on the other side, high up on the wall with the woman holding my arm, I looked down and saw all those people down below. They all looked gray and angry, and one of them...” She sniffed back tears. “It looked like Grandma.”

“Well, Grandma's...”

Before she could finish, Emily head the door opening, and she looked over to see Robert leaning through.

“We're ready for you,” he told them. “It's time to put the plan into action.”

***

“Wow,” Emily said as she and Lizzie followed Robert into the main lab, “you guys really didn't mess about, did you?”

Ahead of them, a chair had been set up in the center of the room, with various wires running from the frame to a set of computers on a nearby desk. Monitors and laptops had been lined up to keep track of proceedings, and cameras had been positioned as far back as the rear wall, with more outside beyond the windows.

“We're not taking any chances,” Robert explained. “At the house last night, all the cameras and monitoring equipment suddenly stopped working, but the gear in the car seemed fine. We figure there's a radius of potential interference, so we need cameras far enough back that they won't be affected. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and we'll learn for next time.”

She turned to him. “Next time?”

“This is just the beginning. Day zero, so to speak. We're going to communicate with the people on the other side.”

“And I'm going to sit in that thing, am I?” she asked, eying the main chair cautiously. “Why are there handcuffs attached to it?”

“Why do you think?” he replied, stopping next to the chair. “If the creature tries to drag you through, we want to make it a little more difficult.”

“By tying me down?”

“Got any better ideas?”

“Mummy,” Lizzie whispered, tugging on Emily's arm, “I don't like it.”

“It's okay,” she replied, tousling the hair on top of her daughter's head. “It's just one time.”

“Sorry, Lizzie,” Robert said, smiling at her, “but we figure it's safer for you to be here. You just have to trust that we know what we're doing, and that we're not going to let anything bad happen to your mother.”

Eying him with suspicion, Lizzie frowned.

“Do you really think anything'll happen?” Emily asked, as she sat down. “I mean, wouldn't this creature, whatever it is, stay away as soon as it saw all this equipment?”

“I don't think it can,” Robert replied, grabbing the handcuffs and slipping them over her left wrist. “It's desperate, and it probably thinks there's nothing we can do to stop it. From its point of view, probably only a second has passed since last night and tonight. If there's a -”

“Wait,” she said suddenly, reaching out at the last moment to keep him from clicking the cuffs shut.

“Don't be scared,” he told her.

“I'm not, but -” She paused, before sighing. “Okay, I
am
. The truth is, I've always been scared, even that first time you hooked me up to stuff all those years ago.”