Walking With Ghosts (A short story) (3 page)

Anders nodded to a mobile van blocking half the street. “They’re checking surveillance right now. Trouble is,” he made a motion with his head that included all the cops and the Sunday shopping crowd. “easy to get lost.”

Josie checked her watch. Noon. “That’s two hours already,” she said. “Christ, it all seems so slow when you want stuff to happen.”

Anders pointed as a second van’s doors were flung wide and six cops jumped out, followed by some civilians. The cops were waving A4 sheets as if in triumph.

Josie knew what that meant.

“Eye-witness sketch,” Anders now looked a bit brighter. In such depression even the merest token is inspirational.

Josie waited until her turn came for the handout. The composite was grainy, showing a blonde-haired man with bushy eyebrows, long straggly hair and a hook nose. Dark eyes. But probably his most outstanding feature was his spade-like chin. He’d been wearing a blue jacket and jeans, and carrying a rucksack.

“Well,” Anders said. “He can’t shave that off.”

She glanced away from Anders then and looked both ways along the street. She stopped when, at the limit of her eye-line, she thought she saw something glimmer from the roof of a building.

“What’s. . .?“

Anders swung round. “Eh?”

Josie clammed up, only too aware of all that had happened since the start of her shift. “Nothing,” she said, and she drifted slowly away from the new constable. After a minute she mingled with the flow of pedestrians without every taking her eyes away from the spot where she had seen the glimmer.

She now found herself back at the corner of Stonegate, beside the tiny Starbucks. The staff inside were beavering away, but the long queue had begun to snake out the door. To Josie’s right was a short street that led to York Minster. When she looked up at the place her mind had marked she saw nothing. Just an old roof.

And tiles. Cast stonework. Dirty iron guttering.

Damn.
Her imagination was firing on all the wrong cylinders. She was about to look away when she saw something she couldn’t believe. It was there, before her eyes, but she couldn’t process it.

There
was
something else on the roof. An old stone gargoyle. There were a lot of these scattered around the roofs of York for one reason or another, a veritable chain of the grotesque. This one was pocked and stained and ugly, but there was a shadow writhing around its head like a demonic halo.

Josie stared hard.

And when she did so she heard the
whispering.
A sibilant murmur, like a woman who whispers into the ear of her lover late, late at night. She blinked and shook her head, but the noise continued, never above an undertone, but constant, unfaltering. It was as if the gargoyle was talking to her, a demon bending the ear of a willing supplicant.

The whisper shot off like a leaf caught by a harsh gust of wind. Josie eyes were drawn in that direction and fixed upon a second glimmering, another knot of darkness that all but beckoned her with long, twisted fingers.

She moved immediately, before the phenomenon could disappear. In a moment she was staring up at a second gargoyle, this one in the shape of winged serpent with long, jagged teeth. The whispering roiled around her head and a thought hit her. Did these ancient gargoyles have some kind of sentience? Perhaps they listened, silent statues surveying humanity and all its magnificent quirks.

Perhaps, in the bright light of day, the ghosts still chattered and lurked and watched, biding their time, awaiting their moment.

Now the whisper flew off again. Josie followed it past the St Michael Le Belfry church and close to the Minster. The Gothic cathedral now reared up in all its majesty, overseeing all, and drawing every eye - even locals - as they walked by. The Minster was graced with many a gargoyle, some old and some new, and Josie saw two more glimmerings before she found herself in another inner courtyard similar to the one Joe and she encountered the previous night. So far the whisperings had moved her from light and noise into darkness and solitude despite the Sunday frenzy that surrounded her.

She exited the courtyard, her mind still buzzing, and found herself facing the Treasurer’s House, the site of the best known ghost story in one of the best known ghost story cities in the world.

The Legionnaires.

Josie turned away, but felt her glance drawn back there.
Later,
the voices promised her.

She turned away again, and came face to face with Kayleigh Bryant’s abductor.

****

He was walking briskly around the corner. She made eye contact with him, saw the immense shovel chin. His face fell, his nose flared and he started to run like a hunted dog. Josie didn’t hesitate for a second but gave chase whilst fumbling for her radio, baton, and Taser all at the same time.

“
Stop!”
Oh, for the intervention of a heroic bystander. That’s all it would take; all it would take to help save a little girl’s life and catch a grave-digging monster.

The man dropped a carrier bag. Josie noted snacks and Pepsi and fruit tumbling out along the tarmac, all items that would help to keep a young victim quiet. She pounded the pavement, screaming into her radio, determined to keep this bastard in sight even if her heart burst.

Shop facades flew by in a blur. Pedestrians stood and stared. One old guy looked like he might consider tackling the fleeing man, but when he moved in closer the look on the old man’s face suddenly turned to abject fear. Josie sped past him a second later, getting closer.

They ran under the castle walls at Monkgate Bar. A car slewed in front of Josie, narrowly missing her, but she vaulted its bonnet and hit the ground faster than ever. Her quarry turned a sharp corner and was momentarily lost from sight, but then she saw flashes of his clothing as he climbed a nearby stone staircase.

Damn, the bastard was heading for the castle walls.
The medieval walls almost completely encircled York, and still spanned the entry gates into the city- called
bars.
Josie raced up the time-worn steps in pursuit.

“
Stop!”
She knew he wouldn’t. He was fast, already a good thirty feet in front of her, but he was coming up to a group of tourists. Josie steeled herself and pounded on. Her radio crackled at her belt but she couldn’t lose focus by answering it.

“Look out!” she cried just as he ran into the tourists, anything to cause a distraction. An old woman fell against the castle walls, banging her head. A young couple toppled off the inside ledge and went rolling onto the soft grass a few feet below.

Josie heard sirens behind her, splitting the day in half.
Yes!

The man must have heard them too, for he turned around as if surveying his options. In that moment, Josie redoubled her efforts and came to within six feet of him. Then, unbelievably, he clambered atop the castle walls themselves. Josie dived for his legs, sure he would never jump. The drop on the other side had to be thirty feet or more.

Her outstretched fingers brushed his cement-stained trainers as he leapt into space. Josie’s headlong dive sent her crashing into the stone wall, grazing her face and ripping a nasty cut above her right eye. She was up in a second though, and clambering atop the walls herself.

She saw him far below, rolling as he landed, rolling, rolling down the rest of the hill.

Miraculously unhurt. If there was a God, she thought, this bastard should have just broken everything except his neck.

Josie looked at the hand that had brushed his clothing. It was covered in some kind of orange residue. She ignored it and eyed the drop. Her target scrambled and crawled and dragged himself to his feet and shot off without even a glance back. He was heading for the huddle of private and student buildings opposite. In there they would lose him.

Josie thought of Emily and hesitated, but riding on the back of that came an image of little Kayleigh Bryant, dressing that morning in her frilly blue dress, the one she loved with the Princesses on it, and of how she might now be sobbing and clutching that red comforter blanket.

Josie leapt into space. The drop was far worse than she had imagined. The green grass rushed up at her, but never seemed to get there. She willed it up faster, heart racing, braced for the impact. When it came, Josie bent her legs and rolled. As she turned over a slice of sharp pain travelled from her right ankle to her knee. She cried out, came to a stop, and paused for a moment, panting breathlessly.

On her knees, she peered from under a bedraggled fringe. Kayleigh Bryant’s abductor had scuttled heedlessly across the road and was even now vaulting a low wall into someone’s backyard. Josie could see the flashing blue lights coming around the corner; she could see the policemen inside the cars, craning their necks in search of the assailant. They were close, very close.

Close. . .but too late.

PART 4

The light began to fade, the western skies quickly becoming a patchwork curtain of purple and orange and gold. The tone inside the makeshift HQ had grown decidedly more sombre these last few hours. Josie’s sighting and chase had given the whole team a morale boost, but any further sightings had dampened their spirits like a downpour snuffs out a burning candle.

Josie’s ankle had been strapped. Now she could move, with difficulty, but she could walk, and that’s all she needed. Her shift had technically ended hours ago, but there was no way she was going home. No way anyone was going home.

This thing would end on
their
shift, no matter when that ending would be.

She hobbled out and into the darkening day. On instinct she glanced up at the nearby roofs, wondering.

The gargoyles gazed back impassively at her, their stony faces full of hate and accusation.

But she’d
tried
, dammit. She felt her own need to give something back weighing like a dead man’s noose around her shoulders. Luck and happenstance had bested her, not lack of will or desire or a poor effort.

She felt the night enshroud her. Darkness weaved its spell and began to alter the perceptions in her brain. Instead of thinking like a cop, like an investigator, she studied the places where shadow met shadow, letting her vision pour into the inky blackness.

Were the omnipresent ghosts chattering at her now, leading her on?

With nothing left to lose Josie walked wilfully into their embrace. Her gaze strayed upwards again, but if there was a darkness above the gargoyles’ heads tonight it was lost in shadow.

But there was no mistaking the red glints in their eyes.

Again, they led her on. Along Low Petergate. Each step made the dread churn in her stomach. Each step invited the blackness to her even more until she felt as if light had never existed in this world. There was a feeling in the air, a foreboding, that something unspeakable was happening tonight, and Josie felt the hairs on the back of her neck rising again.

At Goodramgate she was guided to her left, past the old White Swan pub. Noise and merriment drifted from the open doors and windows, but failed to penetrate Josie’s ethereal cocoon. Goodramgate opened out at the end into a normally busy intersection. But tonight, perhaps it was just because it was Sunday, or maybe because everyone had heard the horrific news about Kayleigh Bryant, the streets were deserted. Even the nearby Italian and Indian restaurants were subdued and sparsely populated.

Josie looked ahead and felt a prickle of fear as a thin, ethereal mist began to drift across the floor. The back of the Minster was to her left, College Street ahead. Her eyes were drawn to the one place they shied away from, the one place she instinctively knew she was being manoeuvred towards.

The Treasurer’s House.

The site of York’s biggest and scariest ghost story.
This was where the Legionnaires walked.

Josie stopped and took a breath. She rubbed her nose and face as if trying to make sure she was still real. And then she heard a horn, desolate in the distance, like the last, dying horn sounded on the last blood-soaked battlefield.

A pale light glimmered across the buildings ahead. The fog drifted across it in patchwork glimmers of white and grey. Somewhere an old gate groaned as it swung back and forth on rusted hinges. Josie stared, her whole body clenched in shock as the entire wall in front of her started to flicker and fade away. What appeared was a huge carthorse, ridden by a tired-looking Roman soldier. The horse pounded the ground with great hooves, but silence overwhelmed everything, as if the night had been robbed of its voice.

Josie’s legs buckled so that she fell to her knees. She noted that when the horses’ hooves hit the ground they
disappeared into it,
as if treading an old, long-buried road.

Behind them came more soldiers, all on foot, walking as if on their knees. Each one appeared untidy and dejected. Josie remembered that this entire legion was rumoured to be lost, destined to walk unknown paths for eternity.