Eleven New Ghost Stories (2 page)

It was then that he moved his
coffee cup and tapped out a rhythm:
tap t-t-t-tap tap
.
That’s the noise it would make. It could happen at any time, day or
night, coming from somewhere in the flat. “The rhythm of six” he
called it. Always the same, never different. It would come from
somewhere far away, never near where he was. And as soon as he went
looking for it, it would stop.

I didn’t believe him, and he
knew I wouldn’t. So he invited me over to come and see for myself.
I was a little sceptical, not just because I didn’t believe him,
but because I thought that this might be some pretext for him to
try something.

We had been close friends once,
but then, after quite a long time of us being friends, he had got
drunk and announced his “love” for me. It was quite definitely not
what I wanted to hear. I’d never really thought of him as someone
I’d want to go out with. I was seeing someone when we became
friends, and I was seeing someone when he suddenly said he was in
love with me.

I suppose I’d always found him a
bit too much work. He was fun to spend time with, to talk to, but
he could get pretty clingy. He barely let his last girlfriend out
of the house – he liked your undivided attention because he wasn’t
very confident. And if you ignored him or didn’t pay enough
attention to him, he could get a bit sulky and offish.

I’d known worse, gone out with
worse, but he never really seemed my type. I’d enjoyed spending
time with him, we were decent friends – I thought. He’d made a bad
lunge for me, and held on too tightly and a bit too long when I
told him to let go. It wasn’t a side to him that I’d seen before,
and I didn’t like it.

We didn’t talk for a long time
after that. And it was only when we started living nearby again,
about a year ago, that we patched things up. Things were good
between us, but he didn’t have many friends in the area, so I saw
him quite a lot, and knew he wanted a little more from me. It was a
bit obvious.

I went along with it any way, I
thought we had to get past this awkwardness – and I did genuinely
like him; we’d had good times. A nice inexpensive night in with him
and his DVD collection actually seemed nice, as long as he didn’t
try anything.

Anyway, we got take-out – pizza
and chips – and put on some movies, a mixture of the good and bad.
But not with the sound on loud – he didn’t want me to miss it if we
heard the tapping. I really didn’t give a toss about it, and just
went on eating and drinking and talking.

We were half way through taking
the piss out of Keanu Reeves in Point Break when he suddenly cried:
“There it is!”

“What?”

“The tapping.” He grabbed the
remote and stopped the movie.

“Did you hear it?”

I had the feeling I might have
heard a knock or something, but I didn’t want to over-play its
significance. But Craig was adamant I had heard the ghost.

“It could’ve just been the
pipes.”

“It’s June, the heating’s off
and none of the taps are on.”

I wasn’t buying it, but I could
see that this was no joke. He honestly believed something was going
on. He was getting all worked up; what mysteries could his home be
hiding? Who had lived here before? What had happened to them? What
kind of restless spirit lived here?

It was a bit sad how quickly the
sceptic had become a convert. He’d started to really believe the
kind of things he was writing about. I teased him about it; he
admitted his imagination was running away with him, but he promised
me that there was something, and that he wasn’t just making it up.
I told him he should contact that fool on the telly, the one who
goes into people’s homes to talk to the dead. He laughed at the
suggestion – at least he hadn’t become a complete believer.

We finished watching Christopher
Lee in The Devil Rides Out at about half-past midnight and there
was still no sound from the so-called ghost.

It was then that he said I
should stay the night – it almost always made some noise in the
night time. Considering our past, this was something I did not
really want to do.

But it was tipping it down
outside – typical British summer weather. The thought of staying
made me a bit uncomfortable, but the lazy part of me was already
thinking: it’s wet, it’s a bit of a walk, you’re pretty drunk and
you can’t afford a taxi. Besides, it was probably safer to stay
here than go out into the streets this late when clearly
plastered.

He sensed doubt on my part, so
he said, “I’m not going to try anything; I’ll put up the fold-up
bed in the library, you can lock the door if you want to.”

So I consented and he set up the
bed for me. His library was in the small second bedroom. As he put
the bed up, I couldn’t help notice just how much stuff he had based
around the occult. Books about witchcraft, hauntings, pagans; all
the classic ghost story authors: M.R.James, Poe, Le Fanu, Stoker…
and suspicious things by sinister folk like Aleister Crowley and
Anton LaVey. I didn’t believe in any of this stuff, but to be
surrounded by so many tomes about nasty things was a little bit
unsettling. It also made me wonder whether he’d fallen under their
spell just a little, and had started to be swept up by it after
all.

I didn’t sleep well, but I put
that down to the booze. I phased in and out; hard to know how long
I was sleeping. I woke myself up properly and tried again. I ended
up reading DVD sleeves in the moonlight. There was probably every
Hammer Horror known to man, multiple versions of The Amityville
Horror – even that movie they banned after the Jamie Bulger murder
(bootleg of course).

I got up after a while to get
some water. I moved in the dark to the kitchen and put on the light
after a little searching. I grabbed a glass and turned on the cold
water tap. The water was massively over-pressured and it spat out
with a thump, hitting the bottom of my glass with enough force to
splash onto my t-shirt. I turned it off quickly, swearing loudly,
before wiping myself down with a tea towel – Craig had warned me
about the tap earlier.

As I tried to wipe water up from
the counter, I heard something. It was the slightest sound of
tapping; not loud, but it was there.

I scoffed – it was the pipes
after all. That idiot! I turned on the over-pressured tap again –
it splashed heavily against the dirty dishes in the sink, getting
me wet again. But I turned if off quickly and waited for the sound
of knocking.

I was sure I’d got it, but then
nothing happened. I waited for more than a minute. I was so sure
I’d found the source, but nothing was heard.

That didn’t prove anything
though; the tap was still probably the most likely explanation. I
filled my glass with water from the hot tap instead. I waited a
little then too, but there was no sound.

I started to walk out of the
kitchen, and then I heard it:

Tap-t-t-t-tap tap.

I stopped still. That wasn’t the
sound of a pipe; it sounded like someone tapping on a wall or a
table. Quite clearly in a rhythm; no clumsy clunking or
banging.

I immediately assumed Craig was
taking the piss, so I walked quickly out into the hall to see if he
was there. It was empty and dark. I looked both ways, down to the
bedroom at the end of the hall, and back across the landing to the
living room. All seemed quiet and empty.

What had he said? It always
stops when you go looking for it… Now it was giving me the willies.
I felt a shiver and suddenly thought it would be best to go back to
my room and hope the dark words of the occultists might protect
me.

I walked forward a little, past
the door to the bathroom. There it was again, behind me:

Tap-t-t-t-tap tap
.

It came from the landing, I was
sure of it. I spun around and saw a figure – I almost screamed, but
after a second realised that it was the hat-stand.

I exhaled and shook my head. I
chuckled slightly at myself and turned back towards the
library.

There it was again:
tap-t-t-t-tap tap.

It was from the stair bannister,
creeping along the surface, getting closer to me with each tap.

I inhaled quickly – then it came
again, from the bathroom door right next to me:

Tap-t-t-t-tap…

…TAP – right on my shoulder!
Like someone poking me hard in the back.

I span around in a fright and
tripped over the end of the rug in the hallway. I fell over
backward with a screech, throwing my arms up in the air. My glass
of water splattered dramatically over the wall. The glass, by some
miracle, didn’t smash – it landed with a thud on the carpet and
rolled up to the door of Craig’s bedroom.

I tried to get up, but as I
scrambled to my feet all I did was roll the rug up under me. I
stumbled again and fell back on the floor with a thump.

The door opened and Craig came
out into the hall: “What the hell’s going on?”

“It touched me,” I screamed.
“The thing touched me!”

He took me into the living room
and, rather quaintly, thought that what I needed was some warm milk
to calm me down.

He accused me of imagining it
because I was drunk. I almost hit the roof: “I felt it! It touched
my shoulder. You expected me to believe you; now you won’t believe
me!”

He said I should calm down: “All
it did was touch you. That’s not so bad.”

“He didn’t touch me, he poked
me!”

“Well, how do you know it’s a
‘he’? Maybe it’s a ‘she’?”

“Oh you’d love that wouldn’t
you? A jealous she-spirit who wants you.” Sounded like the kind of
thing he’d try to make a story out of.

Despite my distress he was
clearly very excited. I’d experienced it too, so there was no
question now. It was real! He was suddenly in his element. It was
time to research, find out about the house’s history, who’d lived
there before, what crimes had taken place in the area – maybe
unsolved?

He’d missed something obvious:
“What about the people who live downstairs?”

“There’s no one – it’s been
empty since I got here. Maybe this is why it’s not for sale –
there’s no sign. I bet it’s something that happened in the house
below.”

It struck me instantly that he
was very much in his own fictional world. That he was actually
living out one of his own stories and that he was going to approach
this like a work of fiction. I tried to point this out, but he said
he’d studied ghost hunting and knew what it was that psychical
researchers do when they hear about phenomena.

I didn’t dare point out that
most of that was made up too – guesswork that lent itself to
mankind’s natural capacity for making sense of things by making a
story. But then I thought, well, what if it isn’t all nonsense? I
had just been poked in the shoulder. And I hadn’t imagined it – I
wasn’t that drunk, surely?

I didn’t sleep well the rest of
that night as you can imagine. I kept having this unpleasant
feeling that I was being watched. I think I was just being
paranoid. But there was something in that house; something had
touched me. I knew it. I didn’t wait around for breakfast; I walked
home and climbed quickly back into my own bed for comfort.

I didn’t see Craig for a week or
so after that. This wasn’t deliberate – the thing at his place
hadn’t scared me that badly; I just had accountancy exams coming up
and needed to revise. I got a phone call from him after a few days
saying he was trying to contact the previous owners of the flat.
The estate agents wouldn’t let him contact them without themselves
acting as go-between, but he was sure their address was on the
paperwork somewhere. He remembered being told they had emigrated
back to India, so it would be a while, one way or another, before
he would hear from them.

He was also going to go to the
town library to see if he could find any interesting references to
the building and had contacted someone at the local historical
society for any interesting things that had happened on the road.
Some of the buildings were noticeably newer than some of the others
and he’d wondered whether they’d been bombed in the war. Was this
the restless spirit of someone trapped in the wreckage? Someone who
had tried to make a noise so they could be rescued, but had not
been heard in time?

He was so keen to make a
narrative out of it.

He called on me again after my
exams were over, under the guise of asking how it went. But quickly
he wanted to update me on how things were progressing with his
ghost hunt. I couldn’t help but be jealous that he had all this
time on his hands to spend chasing his fantasies.

The latest news was that he’d
written to the flat’s previous owners in India, having found their
address, and was looking into finding a way to trick the council
into giving him the address of the owners of the empty flat
downstairs.

His historical research of the
area had come to nothing as of yet; no suspicious goings on to
speak of. Yes, some houses had been bombed in the war – but just
down the street, not close by. The man at the historical society
had been very friendly, but he didn’t have anything “juicy” for
him. He did, however, know someone who was researching a
spiritualist guide to the area, and that he would contact him on
Craig’s behalf. So something good could come of that.

Then Craig stopped silent for a
moment. “There it is again,” he said. “The rhythm of six.”

He said he’d be in touch soon
and hung up. Later that night he texted me asking if I wanted to
come over the evening after. I suggested an earlier time – somehow
I didn’t want to go over there again and be around when night
fell.

I called around at about two in
the afternoon. He invited me up and almost as soon as I had reached
the top of the stairs there it was:

Tap-t-t-t-tap tap.