The Parliament of the Dead (5 page)

As soon as his outline became semi-solid the ghost burst into tears.

Arthur looked at the apparition with bewilderment,“Jumping Jehoshephat!  Who are you?”

The ghost composed himself enough to say,“I’m the spirit formally known as the Grey Monk.  We’ve met before: I haunt Turtlington Manor.”

“I’m sure I’d recall meeting any spirit so…”Arthur paused looking for the word,“em, unique.”

“Like I said, I
was
the Grey Monk; I’ve had a make-over since then.”

There were at least a dozen‘grey monks’in England, and Arthur had met over half of them, but he still couldn’t remember this one.  He was about to ask more when a fresh outburst of sobs erupted from the tragic ghost.

“I was just trying to do my job,”he wailed,“you know - frightening people.”

Arthur nodded sympathetically,“So what happened?”

“I was attacked.”

“Surely being dead already takes the worry out of being attacked?”

Uncontrollable sobbing wracked the strange form of the ghost.  Arthur looked anxiously at the door.  He was worried people would hear.

The ghost saw his glance and snapped angrily,“So what if someone comes in.  I could scare them!  I’d scare them right out of here and all the way home.”

Arthur looked doubtfully at the ghost’s ill-fitting grey boiler suit, but decided not to argue. “Who attacked you?”he asked earnestly.

“I don’t know, but they were professionals.” 

“Professional what?”

“I don’t know!  They were not scared of me.  They had weapons that could have killed…”he stopped and corrected himself,“that could have
destroyed
me.”

“So why have you come to me?”Arthur asked, glancing back at the door.

“Oh stop looking at the door, I can scare whoever comes in.  Of course I can.  I’ve terrified people for centuries.  I leave them nervous wrecks.  Of course I do.  I’ve done it for centuries.” His voice trailed off.

Arthur smiled to himself and repeated the question,“Why did you come to me?”

“I came to you for two reasons.” As he spoke the ghost abandoned his‘updated’image, and returned to the shape of a fat, bald, grey monk.  His attempts to be scary had drained him of the little energy he had remaining.  He looked unimaginably tired and very transparent.  

“First because you know both worlds better than anyone.  I thought if someone from the living were trying to wipe out the dead you might have heard something about it.”

Arthur rubbed his forehead looking genuinely concerned. “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything.”

The Grey Monk looked at the dirty floor through his feet. “There is another reason I came to you.”

“Yes?”asked Arthur, his mind still on the‘professional’ghost hunters.

“I came to you because I heard them say, that after some Egyptian fellas, their next target is‘the highwayman,’and they were going to find him in London.”

Arthur straightened up at these words. “Thank you.  Thank you for letting me know.” Arthur looked at the sad, weary, barely visible form in front of him.

“I owe you one for the information: receive such help as I can give you,”he said to the ghost, and taking a sprig of rosemary from his pocket, he chanted quietly,“
Sit tibi terra levis
.”

The ghost vanished.  Arthur took a deep breath, and strode out through the bar into the night.

Chapter Eleven

Dead Men Walking

Everything was closed; the streets were empty.  Iona had been walking for hours.  She found herself outside her front door again but couldn’t bring herself to go back inside.  She turned away from her house, following, without much thought, the path of Arthur’s first ghost walk.  It was almost midnight.  Some shops were shuttered; others had dim night-lights that made their windows appear a faint shadow of their daytime displays.

She clenched and unclenched her fists as she walked, playing over and over in her mind the latest argument she had had with her mother.  For a moment she was distracted by the sound of raucous singing in the distance.

“
I’ve been a wild rover for many a year
…”

Iona did not want to meet anyone tonight, so she turned away from the direction of the song.  She knew it was a bad idea to be out alone so late, but her anger still outweighed her fear.

“…
and I spent all my money on whiskey and beer
…”

As the voices echoed round the empty streets Iona thought she heard someone nearby call her name, but the singing drowned it out.  Was she hearing voices again?

Iona turned a complete circle looking around for the source of the sound.  When she got back to where she’d started she found a burly figure standing not thirty centimetres from her face.

Iona jumped back, alarmed:“Who are you?”

The stranger had broad features, made even broader by his sizeable ginger side-burns.  He wore a faded and stained leather apron.  When he spoke it was in a peculiar variation of an East End accent.

“Let’s just say I’m a neighbour,”he smiled unpleasantly, his eyes fixed on Iona’s neck,“I’d be more careful about the company you keep.”

Iona took a further step away from the menacing figure.  She said nothing, but the stranger took her puzzled expression to be a question, so he continued, by way of an explanation,“Arthur.  He’s a liar and a fraud, and not who he seems to be.”

Iona stood her ground trying to remember the self-defence  Karate moves she had seen on television, and had tried out on a few of the boys in her class.  Her curiosity had overcome her desire to run from this sinister character.

“All he told you about Dick-blinkin’-Turpin, knight of the soddin’road; that was a pack of lies, and no mistake.”

“OK, so he lied about a dead guy!  No big deal.  Why should I care?”

“He has no right bein’involved with the likes of you.” The stranger was no longer smiling.

He stepped forward.

Iona stepped back.

Iona watched as he reached into his leather apron and pulled out an old-fashioned razor, which he opened with a flick of his wrist.  Its handle was smooth ivory, yellowed with age, the blade was straight and sharp and glinted in the street-lights.

“Do you know why they call these‘cutthroat razors,’girl?”

Iona took another step back, and found herself bumping into a grimy brick wall.

“Girl?  Would you like me to show you?  I used to be a famous barber!”

Iona cast a glance to the left and to the right to calculate the best means of escape, when another voice, deep and commanding, resounded around the street and stopped the stranger in his tracks.

“Mister Todd.  I have told you about such behaviour.  I’ll have the Runners onto you if there is any more of this nonsense.”

The stranger with the razor flinched at mention of the Runners, and backed away from Iona.

The owner of the deep voice was an elderly man, wearing the wig and gown of a judge, carrying a bundle of musty and dusty papers and an impossibly large book.

“Judge Hawkins, your Worship, I was only playin’around, you know, scarin’the livin’, playing my part.” Mister Todd raised his hands, waggling his fingers and making a ghostly‘wooooh–oooooh!’noise.  He looked embarrassedly at the cutthroat razor still in his hand, snapped it shut and stuffed it back into his apron pocket.

“The girl looks quite scared enough.” The Judge turned to face Iona at last: “Run along young lady.  You are fortunate Mr. Todd is dead.  He killed hundreds of people when he was alive.”

As the Judge spoke, he reached out a hand and the razor leapt from Mr. Todd’s pocket, flew through the air, straight into his opened palm.

To Iona’s wonder, and ever-increasing horror, he opened the knife and passed its blade right through his other hand.  She felt her knees go weak, and willed them not to buckle under her.  She enjoyed this sort of thing in the cinema, but when it was happening in front of her eyes her head started to swim.

There was no blood and no damage to the Judge’s fingers.  It simply passed though him as if his body were as insubstantial as a cloud.  For a moment Iona thought the bewigged figure became a little transparent.

“Goodness!  Mr. Todd, this is a real razor!  I hope you are not up to your old tricks!”

A whistle sounded, echoing through the dark streets, until it met the sound of booted feet running closer and closer.

“Mr. Todd, you give the dead a bad name.  I’d have thought being executed for murder would have taught you a lesson, but the longer you exist the less you seem to learn.  Mr. Todd, I look at you and I truly despair.  Truly despair.  Perhaps the Runners will be able to teach you lesson.”

“Please, Judge, who are the Runners?”Iona’s thin voice sounded much weaker than she had hoped against the noise of stamping feet.

“Are you still here?” The Judge turned to her again,“If you
must
know, the
Bow Street
Runners are the Police, or they
were
, and they still do a good job with the likes of him.  Run along my good little lady, this is not for your eyes.”

The sound of feet was almost deafening.  Iona turned and ran for home, not quite feeling in full control of her legs.

Although she shouldn’t have been able to hear it over the noise, she did.  It was not much more than a whisper in her ear as she ran:“And, young lady,”the Judge’s voice continued,“there is just one thing that Mr. Todd was correct about: don’t trust Arthur.”

Chapter Twelve

Morag’s Departure

The lumpy chair reminded Morag of the straw bed she had once slept on as a child in her grandparents’house. “Och, he never did anybody a pinch o’harm,”she muttered to herself in the rapidly-emptying railway carriage.  She was on board the train from Edinburgh to London.  The other passengers did not want to spend the 250-mile train journey next to a mad old woman.“Blasted priests, poking their noses in, them and their shotguns.  My poor, wee, dead Harold blown to Kingdom-come without so much as a by-your-leave.”

She was distracted for a moment by the lights of a station as the train sped past without stopping.  Her heart started beating faster: this was the furthest from home she had ever been.  Soon her thoughts returned to her late husband, and the reason for this journey.  She continued muttering to herself in her broad Scottish accent, “He was dead already; where’s the harm in helping your wife when you’re dead?”

“E-excuse me, madam, did you say dead already?”

Morag looked up from her grumblings to see a man dressed in a faded medieval costume, whose body was sporadically wracked with spasms.  Despite having lived with a ghost for fifteen years, Morag was shocked to see another one sitting opposite her in the train.  She felt her heart lurch uncomfortably and a shooting pain in her arm.  She clutched her chest as a numbing cold spread throughout her body.

“Oh dear lady are you alright?  I didn’t mean to scare you madam…hgg wrrooo ndndnn idgee nooobaga!”the Mental Minstrel of Mimsgate-upon-Mudd held up his hands,“but I thought I’d overheard something about priests attacking a ghost?”

“My poor dead Harold.”

“Yes, I think they might be the ones who banished my agabannnn gghn d-dear friend, the Higginswaite ghost.”

“And who might you be?”asked Morag.

“My friends call me Gibbs.”

“I’m Morag McClure,”replied Morag, holding out her hand, then quickly withdrawing it as she took in the minstrel’s transparent form.

For a moment they were silent, looking at each other in mutual sympathy for their respective losses.

“So what are you going to do n-now?”

Morag sighed.  The chair had stopped feeling so uncomfortable; she thought her back might be going numb. “I jus’dinnae ken.  I think I overheard these bad men saying they were going to London.  I wish I knew what I’m ginna do if I meet them again, but I’m ginna to look for my revenge.”

“Od’s bodkins!” Gibbs exclaimed,“You’re a tough old bird.  Maybe we can work together.  I’m going to call the P-Parliament of the Dead.”

Morag waited while a fit of uncontrollable gibbering possessed her new travelling companion.

“Hahaha ogh nbble whsoo nanana heyyyheyy d-d-d-d-daie!  S-sorry, but if it’s more than just Higginswaite who has been attacked the Parliament must take action.  Will you help?”

“If I can do anything to help get those evil swine who took my Harold from me…”

*   *   *

The train pulled into Euston Station after midnight (delayed by frogs on the line).  Morag and Gibbs waited for the train to empty so that they could continue their journey together without causing panic and alarm.

“Are you just l-leaving that there?”Gibbs asked as they walked to the door of the carriage.

Morag looked from the door to where he was pointing at her body, crumpled and pale, slouched on her seat.  From its blue lips and blank stare she was obviously dead.

“Oh ye great gibbering oaf!  Look, ye scared me to death!” Morag’s ghost glowered at her companion.

“You must have had a heart attack.  I am so s-sorry!”

“Never mind,”said Morag, a smile returning to her ghostly face,“that dear, wee body served me well for almost ninety years, but it
was
getting rather unreliable.  Our mission will be easier without it.”

“That’s the s-spirit!”

Chapter Thirteen

A New Tour Guide

Iona had not slept.  All night she had played over the events of the previous evening: s
he had seen a ghost; she had seen two!

One of the ghosts she thought must have been Sweeney Todd, the‘demon barber of Fleet Street.’ Every time she closed her eyes she could see the image of his razor glinting in the street-lights.  The other ghost had been‘Hanging Judge’Henry Hawkins whom she had also heard Arthur talk about.

“Arthur!” She said out loud to her bedroom ceiling,“I need to talk to Arthur.” He knew a lot about ghosts and even though he could just be making up stories to sell his ghost walks, he seemed to be her best hope of someone believing her.

*   *   *