Night After Night (46 page)

‘I don’t think,’ Herridge says, rubbing a cheek, ‘that we have any reason to suppose that whatever is thought to haunt this place is terribly friendly, do you?’

‘Is that what we all feel?’ Cindy asks.

Helen shrugs.

‘Never felt too pleasant to me.’

Cindy is uncertain about this. It’s not really the house itself. They don’t use buildings, they’re not really squatters, these entities. The famous technical-sounding term ‘stone-tape theory’ used by Roger is misleading. Invented for a TV drama. Stone has its qualities, but a haunting requires the haunted: people, life force.

He feels suddenly quite weary of this, wishing he was normal. Wishing he’d never been exposed during his formative years to the utter strangeness – though not so much in West Wales – of the Fychans. Envying the clean-cut certainty of Ashley and Rhys, sterile though it might be.

Never mind. Too late now. He is what he is.

He taps the planchette.

‘A triangle, see? In ritual magic, a spirit is summoned into the triangle – whether on a table or the temple floor – and held there. The planchette is this same magical triangle in miniature. Seldom spoken of, this, especially in toy shops.’

‘So if we each have a finger on the thing,’ Helen says warily, ‘then we’re inviting whatever it is to…’

‘Cross our threshold. And we don’t even know who it is we are inviting until they’re here. Madness, isn’t it?’

Rhys picks up the planchette.

‘A bit of bakelite or something. With a hole in it. I can’t tell you how scared I am.’

He drops it back on the board. Cindy moves it to its original position away from the symbols.

‘Now then. Customary, it is, to familiarize ourselves with the movement of the planchette. So if we all…’

Ashley and Roger and then, after some hesitation, Helen, apply a forefinger. Cindy looks at Ozzy Ahmed.

Ozzy pushes up a sleeve of his hoodie, holds up a finger in that well-known mildly obscene gesture, looks at it then lowers it to the planchette.

‘There we are,’ Cindy says. ‘That’s— Oh, my goodness…’

With their five extended fingers aboard, the triangle has gone skating wildly away. Ozzy jerks back his finger.

‘Little bugger!’

He looks genuinely alarmed, which is interesting. For Cindy, the nature of Ozzy Ahmed’s scepticism has never quite been established. Cynical, yes, but evasive rather than unequivocal in his dismissal of the others’ beliefs. Resistance rather than
outright rejection. A comedian’s traditional role is as bewildered victim: Ozzy cowering from the madness of his mother-in-law, scepticism as a shelter.

‘Not used one before then, boy?’

‘Never even seen one before.’ Ozzy nods at the board. ‘Where it says “goodbye”, why’s that in big letters?’

‘So you don’t forget, when you’re finishing, to close the door behind you.’

‘And if you leave it swinging?’

‘Then you risk allowing something to remain in the room… unsupervised.’

‘With respect, Cindy,’ Rhys Sebold says, a thin wire extending under his voice, ‘there’s a very sound argument for saying guys like you are borderline fucking insane.’

Cindy doesn’t look up.

‘Rhys, would you be prepared, as an outsider, to keep notes on any answers received?’

Rhys mutters, flattening his back against a wall of the inglenook. Cindy scowls.

‘“Borderline”. Damned once again with faint praise. Now, then, who is to ask the questions? One person, it should be. A chorus causes confusion.’

‘Not Ozzy,’ Herridge says. ‘Unless I’ve been reading the wrong books, they’re not famous for their sense of humour on the Other Side.’

‘No indeed. Sullen, they are, the earthbound, sometimes hostile. Can be like trying to quip your way out of a stabbing.’

‘Has to be you, Cindy,’ Ashley says. ‘What’s your definition of earthbound, by the way?’

Cindy talks, in a non-committal way, about the astral plane, the nearest etheric layer to this world, a clearing house for the newly dead, also accommodating those who would rather not leave, or remain joined to the earth-plane by obsession, compulsion, perversion, et cetera.

‘Wait.’

This is Helen Parrish, shaking her head in faint dismay, as if coming down from some narcotic plateau.

‘Hostility… demonism… obsession… perversion? Is it just me who thinks we’re rushing into this stuff because we think it’s our role in the battle for viewing figures?’

Good point. Cindy takes the chair opposite the inglenook, where the fire’s burning quite low and smoky. While he doesn’t believe the ouija to be hell’s cellar-hatch, necessarily, this air of irreverence is perhaps misplaced.

Roger Herridge sits back, his hair a stallion’s mane in the candlelight.

‘The antagonism of someone like Rhys doesn’t surprise me – I understand his reasons and I sympathize, of course. Ashley’s enthusiasm – possibly
feigned
enthusiasm – doesn’t worry me a great deal either. How can we possibly be harmed by childish nonsense? But I really don’t think I’d want to ride roughshod over Helen’s reservations.’

‘All right, point taken,’ Ashley says. ‘We don’t
have
to do this. However…’

‘Yes.’ Cindy folds his arms. ‘Roger raises an interesting point. Why
are
you so keen to employ the talking board, Ashley? As someone for whom words like “psychic” and “spiritual” mean not much. I do think a little… candour might be in order at this stage.’

‘You’re a hard man, Cindy.’

‘How flattering.’

‘Look… all right… yes, I think the idea of spirits invading our space is complete rubbish. But I’m willing to consider the possibility that this… thing… can act as a sounding board, if you like, for our personal anxieties. That we can project our feelings through it and get beyond our normal inhibitions.’

‘A channel for the subconscious?’

‘Not all of us find it very easy to explain our feelings unassisted. Look at Ozzy.’

Cindy turns to Ozzy.

‘Difficult week for you, boy?’

‘Not especially.’

‘Spent the most profitable years of your career, you have, dissing all those cranks… and now here you are faced with the prospect of becoming one. Stressful, indeed. A bit like poor Paul on the road to Damascus. “Please don’t let this happen to me, I’m an accountant
.”’

‘You’re a bugger, Cindy.’

‘How much flattery can a man take? Listen, I think I’m deducing that Ashley would like us to try and contact whatever has been invading your space. Purely as a psychological exercise. Correct, Ashley?’

Cindy feels the sharp gust of Rhys Sebold projecting himself from the wall.

‘For Christ’s
sake—’

‘Rhys, you don’t believe in Christ. Do you?’

‘You just… you leave him alone, all right? Just keep your noses out. He’s tired, that’s all. Came here exhausted by overwork. He feels he has to perform constantly. If you want to watch a man crack up, melt down, just carry on with this…’

Silence. Ozzy is sitting between Ashley and Cindy, who feels the boy go tense. But when Ozzy looks up, his face is a scrubbed slate.

‘Thanks, mate.’

Raising a bloodless hand to Rhys. Rhys nodding, perhaps not noticing that his best friend in the house is peering at him as if unsure who this is.

A pregnant moment of live television, it is, the viewers thinking,
Yes, he’s right, this funny, amiable man might indeed be on the edge of a breakdown.

But please, please, don’t deprive us of this spectacle.

Cindy puts his head on one side, venturing no opinion either way. There’s a vote later tonight for another exclusion, is there not? He doesn’t mind being seen as what Marcus Bacton might describe as a national bastard, but equally he doesn’t want to
leave these people alone with a ouija board and an obligation to perform.

Ozzy stands up, stretches.

‘Aye, all right, let’s do it. What’s to lose?’ He looks over at the false wall with its duplicitous mirrors, addresses the glass eyes and their controllers. ‘Just give us a few minutes, fellers, to psych ourselves up. Run some commercials, eh?’

57

Close to the land

GRAYLE HITS THE
key, and the phone speed-dials and, hell, if someone doesn’t answer this time…

‘Whoever you are,’ he says, ‘can I call you back?’

‘Mr Gill?’

‘Tomorrow would be good, but not too early.’

‘Mr Gill, my name’s Grayle Underhill from HGTV. The
Big Other
programme? I’m calling about Ozzy Ahmed?’

‘Oh. Yeah, I’m watching him, or I will be when the ads are off. What did you say you did at HGTV?’

‘I didn’t. I research. I take it you’ve been watching the whole show, night after night?’

‘Most of it.’

‘And you’re still close to him, is that right?’

‘In a strictly platonic way.’

‘Mr Gill, Paul Swinton gave me your number. He’s very unhappy about Ozzy’s claim on our programme that he’d been abused by a teacher he called Cyril.’

‘Yeah, he would be upset about that, Paul.’

‘Because it’s not true?’

‘Not for me to say. And if I were you—’

‘See, we’re also a little unsure about Ozzy. We need to know if he’s OK.’

‘Everybody’s unsure about Ozzy. He loves that. Now, if you—’

‘And because we don’t want him to cause any damage to himself or—’

‘Or your company.’

‘—we’d like to know if any other people he’s been close to could be adversely affected by what Ozzy’s been saying.’

Mr Gill laughs.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘try not to take this personally, luv, but I can imagine that you, as a production company, could be very seriously affected by somebody’s failure to figure out where Ozzy’s coming from before they threw him into the bearpit that is
Big Other
. And like you say, he’s my mate. And you – pleasant as you might sound – are not. Goodnight.’

‘Mr Gill—’

God
damn
. She calls up the live gallery, asks for Jo Shepherd, is told that Jo isn’t taking calls right now. Well, no. Jo will be sitting next to Leo Defford, watching male and female fingers descending on the planchette, like they’re meeting for some kind of finger-sex, Defford going, ‘good-good, good-good’.

In a sudden, frenzied need for blood-sugar, Grayle rips into one of the Big Sur cereal bars sent by her old boss, Lyndon, now with the
LA Times
.

Something deeper, more intelligent, more issue-led.

Oh, sure. The old ghost-show fallback: if nothing’s happening, bring out the ouija board. It’s fun, cheaper than a medium and doesn’t need a hundred-page instruction manual. But then neither does a gun.

What really annoys her is that the ouija was quite obviously introduced with the collusion of Ashley. It was supposed to be only Cindy who was more equal than the others but it’s now clear that, in the interests of staying ahead, Defford’s been hedging his bets all along, playing more than one of the residents against the others. Keeping cards up different sleeves.
Bastard.

Grayle abandons the Big Sur bar. An hour or so ago, before the programme started, she emailed Marcus, telling him about Poppy Stringer and Jess Taylor, the camerawoman. Now she calls him on the cellphone.

*

‘Are you male?’ Cindy asks.

The triangle hesitates before arrowing in on NO. It makes a very faint scratchy sound, like a mouse under floorboards.

Ashley whispers, ‘Do we need to ask if it’s a woman?’

‘Are you female?’

YES.

‘Are you known to any of us here?’

YES.

Ashley looks at Cindy, who shakes his head. No, he isn’t going to try to narrow it down. Not yet, anyway. They lie, you see. They’ll finger an individual out of pure mischief. Instead, he says,

‘Did you die of natural causes?’

NO

‘Violence?’

Again, there’s a moment’s hesitation before it replies in the positive. It always moves directly to yes or no, their fingers clearly resting so lightly that it seems impossible to tell if anyone’s pushing. Doesn’t look like it. Under the table one of his knees is touching Helen’s, the other Ozzy’s. He’s asked for them all to concentrate on Ozzy, his interests, his welfare.

‘Did the violence occur here?’

NO

This is the third apparent spirit to come through. The others made no sense, as if the planchette was only warming up, and were soon terminated:
Goodbye.

‘Was someone here witness to the violence?’

Hesitation, then

NO

Ashley: ‘Go on, Cindy, you’re walking all round this. Don’t be a wimp. Ask if it was murder.’

‘Is someone here…?’

…the cause of it, he was about to say, but the planchette is already moving, as if impatient with them. Cindy allows his finger to be dragged along to the letters of the alphabet.

G

U

Roger Herridge says, ‘Gun?’

I

L

‘God,’ Helen says, ‘this is genuinely unnerving. It is actually as if it has a mind of its own.’

T

Y

‘Someone’s guilty?’ Herridge says. ‘Of what?’

The planchette is static.

‘Don’t you see?’ Ashley is inflicting upon them her famously condescending smile. ‘It’s the perfume. The perfume Ozzy was smelling in his room. Guilty by Gucci. As worn, memorably, by his ex-wife on their first date… what, fifteen years ago, Ozzy?’

Ozzy stares ahead, into the fire.

‘Something like that.’

Herridge says ‘But guilty of
what
?’

The planchette moves to the letter A, then the letter B. In this chamber, against this wan light, it’s already acquired a distinct, mischievously knowing personality. They are the Seven again, the planchette is the new seventh. The others have given birth to it.

U

Cindy watches his finger amongst the others as if it’s no longer his. He examines the faces of the others, nobody taking it lightly, even Ashley’s hazel eyes conveying a suspension of disbelief. The planchette is an emotional magnet, drawing them in. Helen’s knee and calf are against his.