Night After Night (38 page)

Rhys, big voice distorting.

‘Leave him.’ Roger Herridge. ‘You don’t know what…’

Then the voices are dusted away by a close whisper.

‘
Bleeding
.’

Not a wide shot any more. No more than the width of a face.

Ozzy’s face so close to the false wall it’s like he’s trying to deliver an open-mouth kiss to the camera lens.

He backs off, eyes wide and glassy.

‘She was bleeding.’

‘Tears,’ Grayle breaths. ‘Jesus, God, look, there are tears in his eyes.’

Defford’s on his feet, his face looks paler than his hair, and he’s impossibly excited.

‘Put out a call for Max.’

‘
She was bleeding!
’

Ozzy swaying, then down on his knees, sobbing.

48

Dirty lantern

THE ATMOSPHERE IN
the live gallery ought to be electric and, in a way – not a good way – it is. It’s like they got all the wiring wrong and nobody noticed until now.

Mutiny?
Is that the word? Whatever, he’s ignored it. Ignored the bell. Ignored the Matthew Barnes recording, repeated twice:
‘Mr Ahmed to the chapel, please.’
If it wasn’t just a recording and he wasn’t just a hired voice, Barnes would be screaming obscenities through the wall by now.

Glancing from face to face in the gallery, Grayle notices how close trepidation is to anticipation, excitement to dread.

Leo Defford and Jo Shepherd are watching a monitor screen featuring Ozzy Ahmed curled like some kind of crustacean on his bed, face hidden by a pillow and the arm wrapped around it.

‘What are we supposed to do about this?’ Jo says, a little shrill. ‘What can we do? Dock his pay? Would he care?’

‘End of the day,’ Grayle says, ‘we need him more than he needs us.’

‘Never a good starting position,’ Defford admits. ‘Someone told me, play safe, stick to losers. The slippery slope, looking down. I laughed.’

He digs the fingertips of both hands into hair that might, after all, be prematurely white. Less than two hours from the first transmission. That, at least, is safe: a full recorded programme put together, with the emergency extra hour added. No way can they go live after midnight, not now. Events already have overtaken them.

Leo Defford – oh God, how dangerous is this? – is
one step behind
.

‘Looking on the bright side,’ Jo says, ‘one way or the other, it will be magnificent telly. Eventually.’

‘Not,’ Defford says heavily, ‘if the guy turns out to be a basket case, emotionally flaky or drunk… This programme is not about the pity of somebody coming apart.’

He makes an executive decision.

‘Get Parrish in.’

At first, Helen Parrish looks oddly appropriate in the chapel, priestly in her grey cowl-neck sweater. They’ve altered the lighting so that you can see the pews behind her Gothic chair, receding into shadow. But, if Defford’s looking for stability from Helen, her hollow-eyed half-smile is not encouraging.

‘I don’t know that I can help you much with Ahmed. Didn’t really see how it happened.’

‘We’ll get to that,’ Grayle says. ‘Helen, after you finished your story you seemed drained.’

‘Mmm.’

‘But relieved?’

‘That I’d finally unloaded it, yes. When you’ve been carrying something around for so many years…’

‘When Ashley suggested the whole Diana incident was likely to be more about your own emotional state than, say, the location, you didn’t seem inclined to argue.’

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Why was that?’

Helen thinks about it over a long, tired breath.

‘Didn’t seem worth it. I suppose I didn’t care what she thought. Or anybody. Just glad to have told the story, in a very public way. I could argue all night and it wouldn’t alter Ashley’s world view. What’s the point? She is what she is.’

‘When you say—’

‘Doesn’t matter how anybody else explains it, who believes it
and who doesn’t. It’s all just opinions. Scepticism, atheism – they’re just opinions, they’re not based on any kind of empirical knowledge. Anyway… it’s out there now for the crows to pick at. Joined all the other ghost stories out there.’

Helen looks sad but somehow not unhappy. She’s on a different level. Grayle’s fascinated. This is the programme doing what it needs to do.

‘Helen, earlier, when you were getting started, Ozzy made a smart remark, and—’

‘Smart remarks. There you go again.’

‘You still feel that?’

‘About Ahmed? Hmm. Not sure. Bit of an eye-opener, wasn’t it?’

‘What did you see?’

‘Saw there was someone missing from the circle, and then I saw him at the bottom of the room, and he seemed agitated. I thought his shoulders were shaking. Looked like he’d just got up without a word and started walking towards something. Not looking where he was going, knocking some of the candles off the table. And of course they went out, reducing visibility even more. And then I saw that he was genuinely crying. Thought it was laughter at first, but he doesn’t laugh much, does he? Not his style.’

‘You think he saw something. In the room.’

‘Perhaps he did. I don’t know. Or maybe something he saw or even something one of us said brought back some aspect of his own history that he’d buried.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know anything about his past.
Something
must’ve broken up his marriage, and I’d be surprised if it was just his mother-in-law jokes. Makes you…’

Helen goes quiet.

‘Go on.’

‘It does rather make you wonder if there isn’t something in this house – or what we’re doing here – that opens up doors
into your subconscious mind. When I was describing what happened at Althorp, I really felt I was there. All the colours were alive – green and blue and white and so vibrant I wondered if all of you could somehow…’

Helen’s shaking her head, hands raised.

‘I think I should shut up.’

‘No, keep going, Helen, please.’

Through the windows of the booth Grayle sees rapt faces in the reality gallery watching her from both sides. If this programme has half the impact on the viewers…

‘Were you at any stage wondering if maybe you’d brought Diana herself into—?’

Stop
. Don’t put words into…

‘When Ahmed was mumbling to himself,’ Helen says, ‘he was talking about a woman.’

‘Bleeding.’

‘Yes. Bleeding. I was thinking about Diana in the crash in the tunnel in Paris, but then I would, wouldn’t I? Had he entered my… field of vision? I don’t know how these things…’

‘None of us do.’

‘Oh God,’ Helen says, appalled, recovering her old self, ‘please edit this, or I’ll never work again.’

‘… but we have to channel our thinking according to the logic of the situation,’ Defford’s saying, back in gear now as Grayle slips into the live gallery. ‘If anybody saw anything, the chances are it wasn’t anything to do with Diana. If we’re looking for something that answers to the logic of this house, that’s not it. Jo, let’s open up a storyline here. Get somebody moving on it.’

Grayle slumps into her chair staring at him. It’s like she can see his aura, and it’s brightening again, a lurid yellow.

‘You’re thinking Trinity, aren’t you, Leo?’

‘I’m thinking that’s definitely got to be something worth following.’

‘Blood,’ Grayle says. ‘Abortion? That didn’t even happen here? And wasn’t it pre-empted, anyway, by a heart attack?’

He doesn’t reply. Grayle thinks of contagion. Something happens and Helen Parrish thinks of Diana and Defford thinks of Trinity Ansell and Ashley Palk thinks of the power of suggestion.

‘I think I need the bathroom,’ Grayle says.

In the nearest portaloo, she switches on her phone. First chance she’s had to check out Jo’s message.

Ten minutes in. When Defford’s watching the first programme go out. When nobody will see someone walking round to the walled garden and the chapel. When nobody will miss her. What’s
this
about?

Outside, the wind’s on the rise, sending clouds scurrying across a fugitive moon. Grayle walks away from the porta-village to where she can see the house, only one corner of it lit and that dimly, like a dirty lantern.

It’s not about ghosts right now, it’s about people and how they react to their confinement and one another. Maybe that’s all it will ever be about: seven people trapped inside the glass of a dirty lantern.

When she gets back into the stable and the live gallery, Defford and Jo and a couple of the directors are on their feet, watching the pictures. Jo glances over her shoulder.

‘He’s on the move, Grayle.’

‘Ahmed?’

‘He could be coming down.’

49

Hurt

OZZY
’
S IN THE
doorway, standing like some introverted only child at his first party. JESUS SAVES on his chest in white, with a fish symbol.

For long moments, nobody speaks to him.

Most of them have been talking about him behind his back, for the benefit of several million viewers, but now they’re embarrassed. Because what he did
was
embarrassing.

It’s like the tension has frozen the screens.
It’s artificial
, Grayle thinks.
It’s just reality TV, for Chrissakes
.

Even Rhys Sebold says nothing – Rhys who’s been defending Ozzy against the ridiculous claims that he might actually have been affected by this house. Rhys is in a black shirt open to a chained symbol that’s unlikely to be religious. He looks down at his feet in patent leather then over at Ashley Palk for backup.

In the end it’s Cindy who walks over to Ozzy.

‘How are you, boy? Feeling better?’

The room’s brighter now, all the fat candles back on the table, lit, and a match applied to the eight stubby candles projecting from the overhead hoop. Roger Herridge did this, without asking anyone.

It’s just over one hour to transmission when Ozzy clears his throat.

‘I wouldn’t mind telling my ghost story. If that’s all right.’

It isn’t all right in the gallery.

‘
Shit
.’

Defford’s chair is pushed back. According to the schedule, Ozzy isn’t due to say his piece until tomorrow after the Helen Parrish story has broken, thus swelling the viewing figures. And now a call’s come in for Defford from Channel 4. He’s going to be out of the loop until after the first programme’s gone out, the other side of midnight. He’s going to miss the end of this, which means that he’s
two
steps behind. He bends to Jo.

‘Just… don’t get this wrong.’

Like she can alter anything. Like any of them can. Grayle’s glad when he’s gone. It eases the pressure on them to try to adapt everything to what Defford calls the logic of the situation.

It’s back to dirty lantern logic, now, which is no logic at all.

Ozzy says his school, up in Yorkshire, used to be a grammar school, then the poshest kind of state comprehensive. It was in an old building, late eighteenth century originally, some Victorian additions with flat-roofed 1960s projections.

It had a haunted room.

‘Science lab,’ Ozzy says. ‘Biology.’

He’s agreed to sit down, but not too near the fire. He’s broken up the arrangement of chairs set up for the storytelling session and sits in the centre of the chamber, on a hard chair. His back’s to the screen with its camera holes, so it’s all down to the false wall mirrors and the eyes between the ceiling beams.

‘I think it was only said to be haunted because it had this… skull. His name was Reg. Reg the skull. He was in this glass-fronted cupboard high up on one wall, and it was said that sometimes Reg would disappear from his cupboard and he’d be found somewhere else. Which I think actually did happen once, but that was some lads on their last day at school, having a laugh.’

Ozzy expels a little amused puff of air. In the gallery, Grayle takes Defford’s vacated seat next to Jo. This is weird, it’s like nothing happened earlier, like Ozzy’s mind just blanked it out. What if he does have some
condition
?

‘Used to be a lot of made-up stories about Reg – how he was the first school caretaker who fell off the roof, brains all over the quad, which explained the patched-up bits in his skull. So attached to the school he’d bequeathed his body to the biology department. Bollocks, obviously, but that’s what the first-formers got told. And how Reg’s ghost would be seen in the corridors with his rattly toolkit. There was also a complete set of human leg bones in a long drawer at the other end of the room, and another story was that other bits of Reg were hidden all over the school, and when his skull disappeared it was because he was trying to reassemble himself.’

One of the cameramen finds a close-up of Ozzy’s face, sweat-free and relaxed.

‘So the school was raising money for a minibus for educational trips, and me mate came up with this idea about how four of us would be sponsored to spend the night in sleeping bags in the lab… with Reg. Well, the teachers couldn’t refuse, but equally they couldn’t leave us alone on education authority premises all night. So one particular teacher agrees to come and check on us. He’s dead now or I wouldn’t be telling you this. I’m going to call him Cyril.’

Ozzy describes how they made a space in the centre of the room for the sleeping bags, and brought sandwiches and cans of Coke. One of the lads had this torch with coloured filters, and he kept shining it up on Reg so there’d be this evil-looking red skull grinning down at them.

‘Or green – that was the worst. You’d go to the lav and come back and there’d be this slimy light down the side of the door. Oh – should’ve said – it was a full moon – we had to do it on the night of the full moon, so it wasn’t much better when the torch was off. Old Reg grinning up on his shelf in a moonbeam, the black holes of his eyes. I didn’t like it. Well, I was a timid kid, I’m not scared to admit that. Makes me annoyed now to think of it. Wimpy little Arab.’