The Haunting of Emily Stone (9 page)

“And that's how you know it's one of the nights she's going to appear?”

She nodded.

“And then what happens?”

“And then...” Another pause, as she stared straight ahead. “And then I start to see her face in the darkness. She usually starts on the other side of the room and slowly comes over to the bed.”

“She's looking at you?”

She nodded. Again, her heart-rate spike briefly, and this time she winced a little, as if she was in pain.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded.

“What does she do when she reaches the bed?”

“She looks at me.”

“Just that?”

“She looks down at me.”

“And do you hide your head under the covers?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Because I want to see what she's doing.”

“That's very sensible. It's a bit like what I'm doing with all these machines and questions.”

“And then she starts knocking things over. That's when Mum hears, usually, and she comes through.”

“You don't call out for her first?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“I'm too scared.”

“And when your mother comes in, she sometimes has a camera?”

“And there's a big flash,” Emily replied, “when she takes a photo.”

“But in some of these photos,” he continued, holding up an image of Emily being thrown through the air, “you're not in bed.”

She frowned, staring at the image.

“So does the lady pull you out of bed and do this?”

Emily paused for a moment, before slowly nodding.

“So she's angry?”

“Mum says she must want something, but we don't know what.”

“That's a possibility,” he replied. “So the -”

“Are you really an expert on ghosts?”

“Well... I've certainly studied them a lot.”

She paused, as if she wanted to ask something else but was a little scared. “Can we talk about the first time?” she said finally, with tears in her eyes.

“The first time you saw the woman?”

She nodded, and for a moment she seemed to be grimacing with pain, as if something was really hurting her.

“Okay. Why do you want to talk about the first time?”

“Because that was the only -” She paused again, as if she'd caught herself just in time. A tear began to run down her cheek, but she quickly wiped it away.

“Was the first time the scariest?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Tell me about it.”

She glanced over at the door to the kitchen, as if she was worried about her mother overhearing. “I'm not supposed to talk about the first time,” she whispered finally. “Mum told me to talk about the other times.”

“Well, that's okay,” he continued. “You can talk to me about anything you want. If you want to start with the first time, then we'll do that.” He waited, but she seemed much more scared than before, even as she turned back to look at him. “You're completely safe,” he said after a moment. “Nothing's going to happen to you, Emily. I just need to know what happened, so that I can think about ways we can maybe stop it happening in future. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

“I was in bed,” she continued, “and I heard something moving nearby.”

“Like footsteps?”

“A bit. And then I...” She stared down at the table for a moment, as if she was reliving the whole thing. “I looked over at the window, and I could see a shape in front of it, walking across the room.”

“Coming closer to the bed?”

She shook her head.

“Just... walking across?”

She nodded. “And then it stopped, like it was thinking. And then it turned to me.”

“Could you see its face?”

“Just the outline.”

Looking down at her hands, he saw that for the first time during their interview her fingers were trembling. Glancing at the monitor, he realized that this time her heart-rate was rising and rising, getting higher instead of spiking. For some reason, talking about the first night seemed to upset her a lot more.

“What happened next?” he asked, turning back to her.

“She walked out of the way,” she replied, her voice tense with fear now, “and I couldn't see her anymore.”

“But she was still there?”

She nodded.

“How could you tell?”

“I just could. I could hear her.”

“And the other times you saw her, she was always more direct?” He waited for a reply. “You want to talk about the first time some more, don't you?”

She nodded.

“So did you see her again on that first night?”

She paused, before nodding again.

“When?”

“She got onto my bed.”

“
Onto
the bed?” He made a note on his pad. “I don't remember reading that in the newspaper reports.”

“She got on at the bottom,” Emily replied, with more tears in her eyes, “and then she slowly started crawling up.”

“Why didn't you call for your mother?”

“I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know, I just couldn't. I couldn't move.” She paused. “She crawled all the way up to me. It took a long time, she moved slowly. I could feel her hands on me, it was like...” Her bottom lip was trembling now, as if the memory was too horrific. “I could feel her skin,” she whimpered finally, “it was torn, like pieces were falling off. And then she put a hand on the side of my face and forced me to turn my head to one side and -”

He waited for her to continue. “And what?” he asked eventually.

“Her voice...”

“This was the first time you heard her voice?” Again, he waited for her to say something, but she seemed almost too horrified to go on. Glancing at the monitor, he was that her heart-rate was soaring, and he knew he should stop the interview but at the same time he felt he had to go on, just a little further.

“She asked my name,” Emily whispered suddenly.

“Did you tell her?”

She nodded.

“And then what?”

“She told me about the...” Another pause, as if the idea was too shocking. “She told me about the dead place, where she and the others...”

He waited for her to continue. “What dead place?” he asked finally. “What others?”

***

Today

“The place where she'd come from,” Emily's voice explained, sounding a little crackly on the twenty-four-year-old tape recording. “She said she was from a place where the walls were made out of the inside of people's souls, and she and the other dead people could look out through those souls. She said they could come out sometimes too, but that what they really wanted was to break through forever.”

The tape hissed and bumped a little for a moment.

“Did she give this dead place a name?” Robert heard his own voice asking.

“Just the dead place. She said she was trying to find a soul she could break out from. She said...”

Taking a drag on his cigar, Robert waited for the tape to continue.

“She said she thought maybe she could come through me,” the little girl's voice said finally. “She told me that of all the souls she'd found, I was the most...”

There was a pause.

“The most what?” his voice asked.

“Willing,” Emily replied. “I don't know what that means.”

Even today, twenty-four years later, he remembered the look on Emily's face as she told him about the dead place, and about the first time she'd encountered the presence in her room. After the whole haunting experience had been debunked, it was this recording that he kept coming back to, because it was this recording and
only
this recording that still struck him as perhaps having a shred of truth.

Picking up the faded print-out from all those years ago, he saw the read-out from the heart monitor, showing how Emily's pulse had risen dramatically while she'd been talking about the dead place.

“So does she talk about the dead place every time?” he heard himself asking.

Silence for a moment. He remembered her shaking her head.

“Just the first time?”

“Mum says I'm not supposed to talk to you about the first time,” Emily whispered, her voice barely getting picked up by the tape. “She wants me to talk to you about the other times, the times in the photos.”

“Why is that?”

“I don't know. I think maybe she's scared.”

“Of the dead place?”

“She won't let me talk about it. Not even to her.”

“But she'll talk to you about everything else?”

“She...” Another pause. “She says...”

Suddenly he heard the sound of a door being opened, and he remembered the way Joyce had stormed in, having evidently overheard the conversation.

“Well, then,” she said, clearly trying to change the tempo of the encounter, “how are we all -”

Switching the recording off, Robert leaned back in his chair. The last thing he wanted was to listen to the sound of Joyce's voice, and he knew that everything Emily had told him with her mother in the room had just been part of the hoax. Still, as he scrolled the recording back to the beginning, he realized he couldn't quite get the nagging sense of doubt from his mind. Even though he knew he was just torturing himself, he began to play the whole thing again.

“Tell me about the figure in this photo,” he heard himself saying on the tape. “Is this the figure you saw in your room?”

Chapter Seventeen

“Mummy,” Lizzie said, standing in the doorway, “I'm tired. Can we go to bed now?”

“Sure, sweetie, I just...” Emily paused as she read the email again. It was short and to-the-point, and finally she sighed as she closed the laptop. Clearly Doctor Robert Slocombe wasn't going to be any help.

“You look sad,” Lizzie told her.

“Me?” She turned to her daughter for a moment, before forcing a smile. “I'm not sad, sweetie. I'm just... You're right. It's bedtime.”

***

They were screaming all around her, reaching up from the darkness and pulling on her body as she tried to climb up to freedom.

Every time she managed to get free of one grip, two more took hold. Their arms swarmed around her, and their hands – frayed and rotten, with pieces of loose flesh hanging down – clawed at her flesh. She reached up and tried to grab hold of something, anything, she could use to pull herself up the gray wall that seemed to have been stitched together from scraps of human flesh. Finally, one of her hands found the inside of a woman's face, and she was able to slip her fingers through the vacant eyes. With every last ounce of strength in her body, she hauled herself above the crowd of figures massing in the darkness, but her brief escape only caused the figures below to howl louder than ever with frustration.

Looking over her shoulder for a moment, she saw them snarling up at her. She glanced toward the horizon and saw a vast sea of figures surging toward her. The air seemed to almost shudder with their cries.

Reaching up again, she slipped the fingers of her left hand into a mouth and then pulled herself up a little further. Her feet scrambled for purchase, eventually slipping into two more mouths and allowing her to climb higher still. With tears in her eyes, she looked over her shoulder again and saw that there were now thousands of dark figures reaching up to her, while in the distance she could see the sphere's other wall, with glints of light bursting through from various mouths and eyes.

Turning, she was about to climb up a little further when she realized she could see movement through one of the eye-holes in the wall of flesh right in front of her. Leaning closer, she spotted a figure walking across a dull, gray kitchen, and she heard echoing voices in the distance, their tones sounding slow and drawn out, as if -

Suddenly she felt a hand grabbing her ankle, its fingernails slicing into her flesh, and she looked down to see that the dark figures had begun to climb after her. She tried to shake the hand loose, before reaching up and trying to climb again. A moment later, another hand grabbed her leg, and she felt herself being dragged back down. She held onto the wall, with the fingers of her left hand poking through a pair of eye-holes, but the flesh began to tear as she was pulled further and further down, and as more hands took hold of her, claiming her, dragging her screaming into the sea of darkness.

They'd won. After so many years, they'd finally got her.

“Lizzie!” she shouted, sitting up in bed suddenly. Sweat was pouring down her body and her heart was racing, and for a moment, in the dark bedroom, she could still feel those hands touching her. Looking down at her arms and chest, she instinctively started to search for cuts or bruises, but there were none. After a moment, she managed to start pushing the dream away, only to suddenly realize that she wasn't alone. There was a small figure standing in the dark doorway that led out to the landing.

She paused for a moment.

“Lizzie?”

She waited, but now that she was certain her daughter was watching her, she felt a shiver pass through her body. The sweat caking her body suddenly felt cold, and as she leaned forward she realized that something seemed very wrong. Lizzie often ran through to her room in the night when something had scared her, but she'd never before stood in the doorway like this, just staring, silhouetted against the landing's dull light.

“Lizzie?” she said again. “Are you okay? Do you want to come in with me?”

She waited again.

No reply.

“Did I scare you?” she asked, sitting up on the bed, which creaked a little under her weight. “I was just having a bad dream, that's all. Even mummies sometimes get those.”

Lifting the edge of the duvet, she waited for Lizzie to hurry over and dive in.

“Sweetie?”

After a moment, she reached over and felt for the bedside light. It took a few seconds, but she managed to find the switch, and then she turned back to Lizzie, who had taken a few steps closer.

“What is it?” Emily asked. “Did something happen in your room again?”

Lizzie stared at her for a moment, with a strangely blank expression, before slowly a faint smile began to spread across her face.

“Lizzie?”

She waited, and she told herself she was imagining things, that her daughter was just playing a prank.

“Lizzie, sweetie, I...”

Her voice trailed off as she saw that Lizzie's smile had grown, while the little girl's stare was fixed on her with unblinking intensity. After a moment, Emily leaned to one side, hoping to get a better view of Lizzie's eyes, which seemed almost completely black.

“Lizzie -”

“I know your name,” Lizzie said suddenly, her voice sounding slightly deeper than usual. “I've seen you before.”

“I...” She paused. “No, sweetheart, you -”

“Your name is Emily.”

She froze for a moment, staring at her daughter and waiting for her to blink, waiting to see a hint of white in the two dark pools of blackness that stared back at her.

“How was your dream?” Lizzie asked.

“My dream?”

“You were calling out.”

“I told you, it was just a nightmare.”

“Did you enjoy it? Did you like seeing the dark place?”

“I...” She paused again, feeling a shiver pass through her body. “Lizzie, why don't you get into bed with me and -”

“It was cold, wasn't it?” Lizzie continued. “So many screams. Do you finally understand?”

“Understand what?”

The little girl paused. “Why I have to get out of there.”

“What are you talking about?” Emily asked, crawling across the bed until she was close to the edge. “Lizzie, why are you up right now?”

“Don't call me that.”

“What -”

“It's not my name.”

“Lizzie?”

“Don't call me that!” she said again, with a hint of anger in her voice.

“I...” Pausing, she reached out to touch her daughter's face, but she held back at the last moment as she felt an unusual chill in the air, coming from Lizzie's body. She wanted to believe that she was imagining things, that maybe this was still part of the dream, but deep down she knew it was really happening. “What...”

Lizzie's grin broadened.

“Are you playing a game?” Emily asked. “Lizzie...”

“I wanted you to see,” Lizzie replied, tilting her head slightly so that her mother could see into her large, black eyes. “I wanted you to understand what it's like in the dead place, so that you realize why I have to get out.”

“No,” Emily whispered.

“No?”

“Please, stop...”

Slowly, and a little awkwardly, Lizzie took a step closer.

“What are you doing with my daughter?” Emily asked finally, with tears in her eyes. “What do you want? Leave her alone, whatever you want, take it from me! Leave her alone!”

“You know what I want,” the girl replied, “but if I can't get it from you, if you keep on resisting, maybe I'll have to get it from your daughter.”

“I'm not resisting! Leave her alone and take me! Don't -”

Before she could finish, Emily saw with horror that something seemed to be moving beneath the skin on Lizzie's face. A moment later, she saw a dark, peeling finger starting to poke out from below the little girl's left eyeball, as if a hand was trying to reach out. Within seconds, the impression of an entire hand could be seen pushing through from under Lizzie's skin, with a dark thumb poking out through the mouth.

“No!” Emily shouted. “Stop!”

“Maybe I should use her anyway,” Lizzie continued, as the hand pushed harder against the inside of her skin. “Maybe it's easier to get through her. I have to get out soon, and all that really matters is that it's someone with a link to this land. They're starting to come up after me, they're starting to catch me. Do you know how hard it was to climb this far? I'm so close and I won't let you stop me.”

“Please -”

“It's not fair!” Emily shouted suddenly, taking another step closer. Reaching up, she put her hands on her face, running her fingers against her cheekbones. “I wasn't ready! He had no right to do this to me!” After a moment, she began to dig her fingernails into her flesh, as if she was trying to pull it all away.

“Stop!” Climbing off the bed, Emily grabbed Lizzie and lifted her up, before hurrying out of the room and over to the stairs. Carefully avoiding looking at her daughter's face, she carried her down to the hallway and then out through the front door, not stopping until they reached the street. Finally, setting her down, she hugged her tight, terrified to look at her face.

She waited, shivering in the night's cold air.

“Please,” she whispered, “don't do this.”

In the distance, a siren passed close to the end of the street, rushing off to some other emergency in another part of town.

“Please,” Emily whimpered, with tears in her eyes. “Please, don't hurt my little girl.”

Trembling, she hugged Lizzie tighter.

Silence.

Finally, Emily took a deep breath and forced herself to look into Lizzie's eyes, only to see that everything seemed to have gone back to normal. There were a couple of scratches from the girl's fingernails, but the other distortions were gone.

Lizzie blinked a couple of times, before looking around with a faint frown.

“Mummy?” she asked hesitantly. “Why are we outside?”

Pulling her close for another hug, Emily looked back toward the house and saw to her horror that there was a faint figure visible in one of the upstairs windows, moving briefly to one side before disappearing from view.

“Mummy, what's wrong?” Lizzie asked, sounding as if she was about to start crying. “Mummy, I'm cold. What are you doing? You're scaring me!”

***

“Can I pay half on one card and half on the other?” Emily asked a short while later as she stood in the reception area of a local motel.

“We don't offer that option,” the woman replied. “I'm sorry.”

“Okay, then...” She looked at the two cards in her hands for a moment, desperately trying to work out which had more money on it, before slotting one into the machine. Glancing at the woman, she forced a smile, even though she knew it wouldn't be convincing. She figured she had just enough money, maybe, to get a night at the motel.

“If you'd like to type in your pin,” the woman said, “we'll see if we can get you into one of our rooms.”

As she entered her pin, Emily looked over her shoulder and saw Lizzie sitting in a chair nearby. The little girl seemed to have gone back to normal now, and she seemed more flustered and confused than scared, but Emily was certain of one thing: they had to stay out of that house.

***

“I'm not begging for anything,” she hissed a short while later, sitting on the toilet. “I just... I need a loan, Brad. She's your daughter too, and right now she can't be in that house. We need to stay in a motel, I've managed to pay for the first night but if you can just send next month's child support a week early -”

“What's going on?” he asked. “Don't give me any more bullshit, Em. What exactly are you and Lizzie doing staying in a goddamn motel two minutes from the house?”

“It's complicated.”

“Are you having another of your episodes?”

“Of course not!”

“I can't take Lizzie right now,” he continued. “It's a bad time for me.”

“I'm not asking you to take her,” she replied, “I just need next month's child support a week early.”

“I don't have it.”

“But your job -”

“I just don't have it,” he said again. “Go to the council, tell them you need money, that's what they're there for. You can't be doing that badly if you're okay to stay in a motel.”

“Please don't do this,” she whispered.

“Do what?”

“You have the money,” she snapped at him, “you just don't want to help out!”

“I don't understand what's wrong,” he replied. “You're not making any goddamn sense, Em, do you realize that? You say you had to get Lizzie out of the house, but you won't say why. You say you can't go back, but again, you won't say why. Is it...” He paused. “It's not more of that ghost bullshit, is it? For fuck's sake, Em, have you infected her with your bullshit?”

“Go to hell,” she told him. “I'll find someone else who'll help
your
daughter.”