Copyright 2015 Amy Cross

All Rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, entities and places are either products of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual people, businesses, entities or events is entirely coincidental.

Published by Dark Season Books

Kindle edition

First published: June 2015

“The haunting of Emily Stone was a hoax. There was no ghost, it was just a money-grabbing old woman and an easily-manipulated little girl.”

Twenty-four years ago, Robert Slocombe thought he had proof that ghosts were real. British newspapers filled their pages with photos of little Emily being tormented by what seemed to be a malevolent spirit. And then the whole thing turned out to be a trick, and Robert's career was over.

And then one day Emily Stone, now an adult with a child of her own, contacts Robert out of the blue and begs for his help. She claims that her daughter is being tormented by a dark entity, and that parts of her original story were true after all. Robert dismisses Emily's claims out of hand and tells her to leave him alone, but then a horrific incident forces him to go back to the scene of his greatest humiliation. Was the haunting of Emily Stone really a hoax, or was there a sliver of truth at its heart?

The Haunting of Emily Stone is a horror novel about two damaged people trying to save a little girl from dark forces.

The Haunting of Emily Stone

Prologue

Two hundred years ago

He used the torn shreds of her dress to wipe blood from the knife.

“Always a sad day when a life gets lost,” he muttered, holding the blade up so he could see its edge glinting in the sunlight. “No-one ever wants things to end like this, but sometimes...”

He paused, before turning to look down at the figure in the long grass nearby. He could barely see her properly, since the grass was too tall, but he could just about make her out, twitching in the spot where she'd last fallen.

“You didn't listen,” he continued. “I told you what to do, and you did the opposite. You fought back, you made me so angry... I warned you, when I get angry, I don't have control over myself. You can't...” He paused, suddenly a little short of breath. “You can't say you weren't warned,” he added finally. “No, I swear, you can't.”

Ignoring her faint gasps, he gave the blade another rub. As he peered more closely at the metal, he saw that small pieces of bloodied flesh were stuck in the knife's serrated edge.

“Damn,” he muttered, glancing across the field and seeing the village nearby. “No-one ever treats me with respect. They act like I'm some kind of idiot, like I'm just a fool to be bossed around and told what to do. I swear to God, no-one ever actually worries about me. If only they knew...” He paused for a moment, watching distant figures getting on with their daily chores, and finally he smiled. “Then again, I'm glad they don't know. They'd try to stop me, wouldn't they? I'm having too much fun for that to happen. I suppose they'll notice eventually, but...”

Checking the blade again, he saw that it was clean.

Nearby, a bloodied hand began to reach up from the grass, trembling slightly in the sunlight.

“You going somewhere?” the man asked, looking over at her. “Where do you think you're going?”

The hand swayed for a moment, as blood continued to run from several deep cuts around its wrist.

“I didn't tell you it was okay to raise your hand like that,” the man continued, reaching out and slashing at the arm with his knife. As the blade caught and cut the skin, the arm dropped back down.

He laughed.

“You've got some fight in you,” he continued, “I'll give you that. Not enough, but more than most people.” He looked down at the blade, which was once again covered in patches of blood. “Now I'm gonna have to clean it again, do you realize that? I've just wasted the past few minutes. Still, I reckon I can do that later. There's no point fussing over it now. I expect you'll be wanting to get on with things, won't you?”

He held the knife up for a moment, watching as drops of blood ran down the blade.

“Looks weaker than before,” he added. “More watery. Maybe you're running out.”

He chuckled to himself.

Setting the knife down, he got to his feet and then pushed his right foot through the grass until he felt her body. Ignoring her gasps, he used his foot to turn her over, until finally she slipped down into the pit he'd dug earlier. Stepping forward, he looked down and saw her slumped at the bottom, slightly on her side and covered in blood. She was mostly naked, save for the cloth bag he'd placed over her head earlier, which was stained with thick red patches that had soaked through.

He listened for a moment, as she sobbed.

“I'll tell people you ran away out of shame,” he muttered, before grabbing his spade and starting to fill the grave. “I don't think anyone'll have any trouble believing that.”

She let out another pained cry, but he simply got on with the job of shoveling more and more dirt into the hole. As each shovelful of dirt landed on her body, she clawed at the bag over her head.

“What you doing that for?” he asked, throwing more dirt down. “Ain't no point.”

Just as he'd almost finished covering her, he saw that she'd managed to pull the bag away, revealing a face that had been carved open. Parts of her skull were showing, and her mud-caked fingers ran across the bone as if she was trying to work out what he'd done to her, as if she couldn't quite believe what she was feeling.

“Peace,” he added, before dropping a shovelful of dirt directly onto her face, covering her completely.

A few minutes later, he was done. The grave was filled, and if she was still clinging to life down there, still twisting and squirming, there was no sign on the surface. He turned the shovel over and patted down the soil until it was flat. Sweat was pouring down his face and the heat of a summer's day was making him feel woozy, so he headed over to a nearby tree-stump and sat for a moment. He figured she was definitely dead by now, since she'd been six-feet-under for more than long enough. Sniffing, he wiped sweat from the back of his neck.

Nearby, the leaves of a cherry tree caught the light of the mid-morning sun.

Chapter One

Twenty-four years ago

“Okay, Emily,” he said calmly, “the tape recorder is running, do you understand that?”

She nodded.

“That's good. So everything we talk about today is going to be recorded, and other people will listen to it later. Is that okay with you?”

She nodded again.

“And the reason for that is -”

“I already explained all this,” said Emily's mother, Joyce, as she tore open a new packet of cigarettes. “You can get on with the main part, none of the papers are gonna want to hear you explaining the set-up. It's the juicy bits they're gonna wanna buy. All about the ghosts, yeah?”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves.”

“Yeah, but there's no need to waffle, is there? You bloody academics love to talk, don't you? Never use one word when ten'll do.”

“I just need to explain it briefly for Emily,” he replied, keeping his eyes fixed on the little girl as she sat obediently on the other side of the table. “Emily, the reason for the recording is that I need to document everything you say and do during this interview so that I can get some other people to take a look later and give their opinions. I also have a camera running over there.” He pointed at the camcorder. “Do you want to give a quick smile?”

Emily paused, before glancing nervously at her mother as if she was waiting for permission.

“Knock yourself out,” Joyce muttered, fumbling with trembling hands as she pulled a cigarette from the packet. She added something under her breath.

Turning to look at the camera, Emily stared for a moment at the dark lens before finally offering a faint smile. She was doing a bad job of hiding her nerves, and as she turned back to Robert there was a look of fear in her eyes.

“Just relax,” he told her. “Are you sure you don't want anything else before we get started? A drink, or maybe something to -”

“She's fine,” Joyce said, lighting her cigarette. “She had some Jammie Dodgers before you arrived.”

“You can't smoke during the interview,” he replied, turning to her.

“Why the hell not? This is my house!”

“It might...” He paused, trying to think of a reason. “It might affect the camera. You're welcome to go outside if -”

“I'm all the way over here. Me smoking won't affect anything.”

“You're over there,” he replied, struggling to remain polite, “but the smoke is already reaching us. Please, Mrs. Stone, if you want to stay for the session, I'm going to have to ask you to put the cigarette out.” As if to prove his point, he coughed a little as he registered the distinctive smell of Marlboro Lights.

Rolling her eyes, Joyce stubbed the cigarette out and balanced it on the side of her ashtray, saving it for future use.

“So,” Robert continued, turning back to Emily, who was still sitting patiently as she waited to begin. “My name is Doctor Robert Slocombe, I'm a researcher at Westerson University, and I'm here today, January 5th 1991, to conduct an interview with Miss Emily Stone -”

The little girl smiled, genuinely this time.

“- aged twelve, of Mardenborough Drive, Coltreath. The time is 14:02, and Emily is attached to a simple monitor that will keep track of her heart-rate for the duration of the interview.” He paused for a moment. “Hi there, Emily.”

She glanced at her mother for a moment, as if seeking permission again, before turning back to him.

“Hello,” she said, before biting her bottom lip.

He paused, unable to shake the feeling that something had changed, that she'd shifted gear and become more confident now that the interview had formally begun.

“Emily,” Robert said after a moment, “I want to start by asking you about some of the things that have been happening in this house over the past few months. In a recent newspaper feature, you claimed that there have been strange noises, strange things that you and your mother have seen, and in some cases you've even interacted with what appears to be some kind of entity.”

“What does entity mean?” she asked.

“A being. Something else that's in the house, apart from you and your mother.”

She paused, before nodding.

“And it's just one entity?” he continued.

She nodded again.

“You're sure of that?”

“I've only met one,” she replied. “It's always her, every time.”

“Tell me about her.”

“She...” Another pause, as a faint frown crossed Emily's face. “She doesn't like where she is,” she said finally. “She's trapped somewhere, and sometimes she can come and visit us in the house, but she wants to come permanently. That's why she's so mad all the time. She says she shouldn't have died when she did, and she doesn't want to stay in the dead place. It's dark and cold there.”

“She told you all of this?”

She nodded.

“So you actually talk to her?”

“She talks to me,” Emily replied. “I don't talk to her.”

“Have you tried?”

She shook her head.

“And this happens when you're in bed?”

She nodded.

“And do you like it when she talks to you?”

She shook her head.

“You find it frightening?”

She nodded.

“And you want her to go away?”

“I don't want to be mean,” Emily replied. “I feel bad for her, but... She's scary.”

Picking up a copy of a local newspaper, Robert turned to the third page and held it up. Covering the top third of the page, there was a black-and-white photo showing Emily shouting as she appeared to be thrown backwards across her bedroom.

“Your mother took this photo, I believe?” he said, after giving her a moment to look at the image.

She nodded.

“Were you hurt when this happened?”

Emily looked at her mother.

“She had a bruise,” Joyce said. “Big one, on her shoulder.”

“And this was when the entity was angry?” Robert asked, keeping his eyes fixed on Emily.

The little girl nodded.

“Do you know why she was particularly angry that night?”

“She said she wants to be alive again. Or at least to see the sun.”

“She actually told you that? In so many words?”

She nodded, before glancing up at the ceiling as if she'd heard something.

“And she took her anger out on you?” Robert asked.

Turning back to him, Emily paused for a moment. “She always says that I'm important. She says I can help her to get free. I think she's mad at me for not doing something.”

“But she hasn't told you what it is she wants you to do?”

She shook her head.

“And this photo,” he continued, turning to another page of the newspaper, which featured a black-and-white image of a door with a blurry shape on the other side, “is the entity you're talking about?”

Emily nodded.

“It's hard to make out her face in this picture,” he pointed out. “Have you seen her more clearly?”

“Once.”

“And what did she look like?”

She thought for a moment. “Angry.”

“Anything else?”

“She had black hair. Her skin...”

He waited for her to continue. “What about her skin, Emily?”

She opened her mouth to reply, but something seemed to be holding her back.

“You've said before that she's kind of gray,” he added. “Is she more -”

“She doesn't have much skin on her face,” Emily replied cautiously. “I could see her skull underneath.”

“That must have been very frightening.”

She stared at him.

“And if -”

“She's here,” she replied suddenly.

He paused. “Who is?”

“The woman you keep asking about.”

He looked around the room, but saw nothing. “Right now? In this room?”

She nodded.

“Can you see her?”

She looked over at her mother for a moment, before turning back to Robert and shaking her head.

“But you know she's here?”

She nodded.

“And how do you know that?”

“I can feel her.”

“She feels it in her bones,” Joyce butted in. “Bit like a cat. It's part of her special gift, all spooky like.”

“And what's her name?” Robert asked, keeping his eyes fixed on Emily.

“I don't know her real -”

“Emily calls her Drella,” Joyce said.

Emily flinched slightly, as if the name itself was painful.

“I need to hear these things from Emily herself,” Robert reminded Joyce. “Is that right, Emily? You call this woman Drella?”

Emily paused, before nodding cautiously.

“Why did you choose that name?”

Frowning for a moment, Emily eventually shrugged.

“You just made it up?”

“I just...” Again, she looked over at her mother, before turning back to him. “I don't know if it's her real name. It's just what I call her.”

“And it's Drella who does these things in your room?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I have a photograph here,” he continued, holding up a black-and-white print, “that was taken by your mother on December 21st of last year.” He showed it to the camera, before sliding it over to Emily. “Can you briefly explain to me what was happening at the time this photograph was taken, Emily?”

Staring down at the photo, Emily paused for a moment at the sight of her own face frozen in a moment of terror with her eyes rolled back in their sockets and some kind of dark liquid running out of her mouth and down her chin. Swallowing hard, she finally looked back at Robert, and this time there was a hint of panic in her eyes.

“Drella was doing that to me,” she said quietly.

“Can you speak up just a little?” he asked. “For the microphones.”

“Drella was doing that to me,” she said again. Her voice was trembling this time. Again, something in her countenance seemed to have changed.

“Drella was making you shake like that?”

She nodded.

“Does she do that often?”

“Sometimes.”

“And why does she do that? Is it when she's angry?”

“She's always angry.”

“She takes hold of her,” Joyce added, having picked up her cigarette and started smoking again. “Shakes her like a rag doll, she does. It's horrible. And poor little Emily gurgles and spits up all this black stuff.”

“Could it be dried blood?” Robert asked.

Joyce shook her head.

“I don't suppose you saved any of it, did you?”

“I'll try that next time.”

“And the photos,” he continued, “are they always blurry?”

“It's only a cheap camera.”

“I guess.” He turned back to Emily. “You're very brave,” he told her.

Without replying, she simply stared at him.

“Are you scared to be in your bedroom now?” he asked. He waited for an answer, but Emily seemed reluctant to speak. “I'd be scared,” he continued. “You should never be ashamed about being scared, you know. Sometimes being scared is the natural response, especially when you're faced with something you don't understand. So... Are you ever scared in your room, Emily?”

“Sometimes,” she replied. “Only when Drella's in there.”

“And how often is Drella around?”

“At night.”

“And does she ever -”

“She wants to speak to you.”

At this, Robert paused for a moment. “Drella... wants to speak to... me?”

She nodded.

“Right now?”

Another nod.

“And how do you know this?”

Emily paused, staring at him with wide-open, excited eyes. “She just told me.”

He glanced at the recorder, to make sure it was still running. “Okay,” he replied cautiously, “I wasn't expecting...” Another pause. “How would Drella like to speak to me?”

He waited for a reply, but Emily simply continued staring at him.

“Is this...” He paused, before turning to Joyce. “You mentioned voices before. Is this how they tend to manifest?”

“I've only heard the voices when she's alone,” Joyce replied. “Through the bedroom door and so on. She doesn't usually do 'em when she knows I'm around.”

Turning back to Emily, Robert saw that the little girl was still staring at him, but her expression had changed. She seemed to be concentrating extremely hard, and she'd lowered her head a little. In the gloomy room, her eyes seemed significantly darker, and a kind of hush had fallen.

“Are you waiting for something?” he asked finally.

Silence.

“Emily?”

The only sound came from the low buzz of the tape recorder and camcorder.

Robert glanced over at Joyce, and saw that she was staring at Emily. Turning back to look at the little girl, he realized she seemed not to be even blinking.

He opened his mouth to say something, but the words wouldn't come.

Finally, slowly, Emily tilted her head a little, while keeping her eyes fixed on him.

“Emily -”

Suddenly, Emily slammed her head down against the table, with enough force to jolt the tape recorder and make Robert sit back in shock.

“This is it,” Joyce said, swallowing hard.

“Is she okay?” Robert asked. “Are you sure she didn't knock herself out?”

Slowly, Emily began to sit up again, and this time the change in her eyes was unmistakeable: they were darker, much darker than before, and her frown had become a scowl, as if she hated the sight of him.

“I've seen you before,” she said suddenly, her voice sounding much deeper, far too deep for a child to be able to manage. “I recognize your ugly face.”

“Am I speaking to Drella now?” he asked, trying to stay calm.

“You were in Leicester,” the voice continued, as if it was speaking through Emily's mouth but not coming from her directly. “You were talking to the Abbingdon girl.”

“I...” He paused. “You mean Lily Abbingdon?” Another pause. “Lily Abbingdon was a girl who claimed to be possessed. I never -”

“Lily Abbingdon was no good to me. I had to climb higher, until I reached this girl.”

“You had to climb?” he asked. “What exactly does that -”

“What do you want from me, cocksucker?”

“I want...” Reaching out, he slid the tape recorder slightly closer to her, to make sure that he got the whole thing on tape. “I'm a researcher, I investigate claims of paranormal activity. I want proof.”

“That I exist?”

“What are you?”

Emily continued to stare at him for a moment, before slowly her mouth widened into a broad smile.

“I want to find a way out of here.”

“Is... Is your name Drella?”

“I have ten thousand names. Don't you understand that yet, you fucking piece of shit?”

“What do you want with Emily Stone?”

“Want with her?” The voice seemed even more distorted now, and louder too, as if it was slowly forcing itself up through the little girl's throat. “I want a body. I want to experience flesh again. I want to get out of this awful place. She's my best option right now”

“Why don't you have a body of your own?”

“Someone took it from me,” she continued. “A long time ago, a man cut my throat in a dark alley and left me bleeding. I was young, it wasn't my time. I want to come back and experience life again.”

There was a pause, before slowly Emily began to laugh. The laugh clearly wasn't hers, however; it was the same distorted, mocking voice that seemed to be inhabiting her body. A moment later, she started coughing, almost as if she was choking, before finally smiling again.

“Why Emily?” he continued. “Why did you choose her? Out of all the -”

Before he could finish, there was a crashing sound nearby. Turning, he saw that a vase had fallen from the coffee table over by the window, shattering against the floorboards. Above, the light started to flicker.

“I wait in darkness,” the voice said after a moment.

He turned back to look at her.

“Each human being is a door out of that darkness,” she continued, still grinning at him. “I choose the doors that will be easiest for me to pass through. I thought you were an intelligent man, Doctor Slocombe. I thought you'd have worked all of this out already, but clearly you're just another fucking idiot who thinks he can dabble in things he doesn't understand.”

“I'm trying,” he replied, “I just -”

“You're full of shit,” she added, as her smile widened. “Even if I tell you my real name, you won't be able to do anything with the information. You're far too dumb.”

“What is your real name?”

She stared at him for a moment, and then finally her lips moved without making a sound.

“What was that?” he asked.

“My real name,” she continued, her voice sounding more distorted than ever, “can only be whispered while I'm in this body. To say it out loud would be to burn this little bitch to ashes. Is that what you want?”

“No-one's going to burn anyone,” he replied, “we just -”

“Come closer,” she told him. “Put your ear to my lips, and I will whisper my name as loudly as I dare. Then, finally, you'll start to understand why I have to get out of this place.”

He paused for a moment. “Perhaps you can... write it down?”

“What are you scared of?” she asked. “Look at me. I'm in the body of a child. If I really wanted to hurt you right now, don't you think I'd have done it already?”

After glancing at the camera for a moment, Robert finally got to his feet. The legs of the chair scraped loudly against the wooden floor as he pushed it aside, and then he made his way cautiously around the table.

As she looked up at him, Emily continued to smile.

“Come closer,” she growled. “Hear my name, if you dare.”

Slowly, he knelt next to her.

“You're braver than most people,” she told him. “I should warn you, though. Just as my name might cause this little whore to burn, so too might it tear through your mind and leave you dying on the floor.” She paused. “Are you sure you want to know? There's no going back after that point.”

He paused for a moment, before finally nodding.

“Then lean closer,” she continued. “Hear my name.”

Slowly, he turned the side of his face toward her and leaned closer, until he could feel her breath on his ear.

“Are you ready?” she whispered.

“I'm ready.”

“Very well.” Another pause. “My name is -”

Chapter Two

Today

“Fuck you, then!” he shouted, raising his empty beer bottle to the moon, and almost toppling over backwards in the process.

In the distance, loud music was thumping from the halls of residence.

“I'm a professor,” he muttered, stumbling forward before falling against the bins and just about managing to stay upright. “I'm a... pro... fessor... I... profess...” He grinned. “I profess my love to you.”

He paused, swaying slightly as he contemplated his next move. For a moment, he laid the side of his face against the top of the bin, figuring he'd just rest for a few seconds.

It wasn't long before he started to snore.

Chapter Three

Twenty-four years ago

“And then she threw up,” he explained, holding the receiver against the side of his face as he sat in the cramped living room. With a towel in his spare hand, he continued to wipe his chin. “Just the foulest, thickest, blackest liquid you can imagine. Not a great deal of it, but I managed to get a sample. The noise was pretty horrific too. Emily Stone definitely has quite a pair of lungs.”

“She threw up on you?” Douglas asked, on the other end of the line.

“On me.” He stuck a piece of tissue in his ear and wiggled it about. “And slightly in me.”

“Nice.”

Hearing a faint creak above, Robert looked up at the ceiling for a moment. He could hear Joyce and Emily talking upstairs in the little girl's bedroom, although he couldn't make out what they were saying. Joyce had hurried Emily up there almost immediately after the vomiting incident.

“And you got all this on tape?” Douglas asked. “Are you sure?”

“I've only watched a small part of it back,” he continued, “but... Yeah. I really think, this time, I've managed to catch the whole thing.” He paused for a moment, and even though he knew it was too early to celebrate, he couldn't shake the slow, creeping feeling that all his years of work had finally paid off. “People always laugh at me when I say I'll prove this stuff is real, but I swear, this time...”

“This time?”

“This time I think we've done it,” he continued, with a faint smile. “I think we've got proof. When I get this stuff back to the university and you and Jenna take a look, your eyes are going to pop out on stalks. It's the most remarkable thing.”

“And you're sure?”

“There's no way a twelve-year-old girl could make that voice come out of her mouth,” he replied. “It's just... When you see the recording, you'll realize that it's not physically possible. And there are so many other things, like items falling from shelves, plus the photos... I still don't know exactly what's going on here, Doug, but something – whether it's a ghost, a demon – something is tormenting Emily Stone and trying to take possession of her body. We just have to work out what it is, and what it wants, and then we have to try to help Emily while also taking advantage of this opportunity to push the boundaries of our understanding.”

He waited for an answer.

“Doug?”

“You realize what it means if you're right, don't you? The implications for humanity if you've got proof that this thing, whatever it is, is actually real. We've dreamed of something like this, but to be honest I think I never expected it to actually happen.”

“That's why I've been working so carefully and slowly,” he continued. “I don't want to make the same mistakes again, but I can feel it, Doug, I'm on the verge of proving the whole goddamn thing. Emily Stone is going to be the first human in history who can be proved to have some kind of spirit creature infesting her body. We're going to be able to investigate this kind of thing with proper funding. We'll go from laughing stocks to pioneers in the blink of an eye.”

“So what was the name?” Douglas asked. “You said the demon, or whatever it is, was about to tell you its real name.”

“I don't know,” he replied. “After she threw up, she got too upset and we had to stop the whole thing. There's time to get into that, though. Now we know we're on the right path, we can afford to do this properly and schedule all the necessary interviews and tests. She's just a kid, Doug, and she's already been through so much. The last thing I want to do is rush and end up burning her out.”

“And you're really sure?” Douglas continued. “It's just so hard to believe.”

“I've never been so certain of anything in my life. This is real. We've finally got proof that these things exist. Do you realize what this could mean for humanity?”

Chapter Four

Today

“Doctor Slocombe, is that you?”

Opening his eyes, he saw that someone was standing nearby in the darkness, shining a torch at him. “Is that a ghost?” he whispered with a smile.

“Doctor Slocombe,” the campus patrolman continued with a sigh as he stepped closer, “you should go home. You don't really want another heavy night, do you?”

“Hey, Carl,” he replied, with his face still resting against the top of the bin, “I'm just... taking a pause.”

“It's two in the morning, Doctor Slocombe.”

“I'm aware of that, Carl.”

“And you're drunk.”

“I resent your implication.”

“Don't make me call this in.”

“What's wrong? Are you going to get some -” He hiccuped. “Are you going to get some real policemen to come and cart me off to the cells, just for being a little beer-filled?”

“Doctor Slocombe, I can't leave you here like this.”

“I'm just resting,” he muttered, closing his eyes. “Don't get your knickers in a twist over me. Or your knockers.” He grinned. “Don't get your knockers up your knacker, Carl. Hey, why aren't you a real policeman, anyway? What's wrong with you, why do you just work campus security?”

“You have to go home, Doctor Slocombe. Right now.”

Forcing himself up, Robert took a moment to gather his balance. The whole campus seemed to be spinning around him, and it took a few seconds before he was able to focus on Carl.

“Alright,” he slurred, stumbling down the steps, “you can keep your knickers in your knacker-yard with your knockers. I'm off. Goodnight, officer.”

“Don't let me find you in this state again, Doctor Slocombe.”

Raising his right hand, Robert kept walking, making his way straight across the grass as he headed home.

Chapter Five

Twenty-four years ago

“Emily Stone,” he said proudly, as he stood on a stage at the front of the conference hall and pointed up at a photo that had been projected onto the main screen. “Twelve years old, an only child living with her mother in Coltreath in the north of England. Emily is a sweet, friendly girl most of the time, but today I'm going to offer cast-iron proof that she has been possessed by the spirit of an entity that she calls Drella.”

A murmur rose from the crowd as Robert tapped the clicker in his hand, bringing up a second image, this time showing Emily being thrown across her bedroom.

Chairs creaked in the hall as people leaned forward to get a better look.

“At this stage,” he continued, “I don't know exactly what Drella is. The case has elements of classic poltergeist reports, but also certain traits that hint at a form of demonic possession. I hope to categorize Emily's situation more fully in the near future.”

He clicked through to another image, which this time showed Emily screaming at the camera with tears running down her face.

“I first encountered Emily when I read the stories about her in a local newspaper. Her mother was seeking help to deal with what seemed like a fairly normal poltergeist case. As paranormal researchers, we all know that this kind of case isn't that rare. They crop up once or twice a year and, let's be honest, they're almost always hoaxes. What struck me with Emily, however, was the sheer forcefulness of the evidence. Right from the start, when I first spoke to Joyce Stone about her daughter's experiences, I realized that there was a strong chance of capturing these events on tape. And so it proved. Lights, please.”

As a technician turned down the lights in the room, Robert switched the projector feed and began to load a video. A grainy, black-and-white image appeared on the screen, showing Emily sitting alone on her bed, with her knees drawn up to her chin as if she was afraid of something.

“This video was recorded on December 28th of last year,” Robert explained. “It was recorded by Mrs. Stone using a basic camcorder borrowed from a neighbor, and it shows Emily talking to the entity in the middle of the night. I want you to pay particularly close attention to the different tonalities in the two voices you're about to hear.”

He turned and looked up at the video, where Emily was still in position, staring at the corner of the room.

“What do you want from me?” she could be heard whimpering. “Why won't you just go away?”

Silence, except for the buzz from the camera.

“Please leave me alone,” she continued, starting to sob. “You're scaring me.”

“Do you think I care?” another voice hissed suddenly, sounding darker and more guttural. It was coming from Emily's mouth, although her lips were moving in a strange, unnatural manner that didn't seem to fit the words at all. “Why would I give a shit about you being scared?”

“I just want to go to sleep.”

“Fuck you,” the voice continued. “You're mine now, Emily, and when the time is right I'm going to use you as my new body.”

From the audience, there was a faint gasp, although one or two people seemed to be amused by the footage.

“Please, Drella,” Emily whimpered, “just go away. I'm scared!”

“You're scared now?” the voice replied. “Wait until I'm finished with you, you goddamn little bitch! You're mine, Emily, and I can do whatever I want to you, whenever I want. The more you sob and cry, the more I'm going to enjoy hurting you, and there's nothing anyone can do to save you! You belong to me!”

“No!” Emily shouted, suddenly getting to her feet and running out of the room, shouting for her mother.

Stopping the video, Robert brought up another photo, this time showing Emily screaming in her bedroom.

“I'll be making the full video and all other media files available to all of you,” he explained, turning to the audience, “so that you can investigate them fully, but I've spent the past six months going over them frame by frame, and I can assure you, they're completely genuine. The voice alone should be enough to convince you, I've had it analyzed by five different labs and they all say the same thing, which is that the vocal chords of a girl Emily's age would not be able to produce something like that. It would be physically impossible, and I've experienced that voice myself, in the room with Emily.”

“What about the mother's involvement?” asked a member of the audience.

“It's always the mother,” added someone else.

“How much does she want?” asked another.

“There's no indication that Joyce Stone is seeking to monetize her daughter's experience,” Robert replied. “Well, not to any great extent. She's been talking to a few national newspapers, and I'm sure they'll offer her something, but I think her primary motivation is just to get some help for her daughter.”

“It's a hoax,” said another voice from the back of the room. “They always turn out to be hoaxes in the end.”

“She's cutting deals with Fleet Street,” suggested someone near the front. “This is like all the other cases over the years. It's a stunt to case in on the public's gullibility.”

“The mother has been very active in seeking help since this began,” Robert explained. “Joyce Stone has cooperated fully, and I truly believe she has Emily's best interests at heart. She's desperately worried about her daughter, as any mother would be in this situation. She wants Emily's story to reach the world so that maybe we can help her. I agree that this is the best approach. We have to remember that this isn't just proving beyond doubt that entities such as Drella exist.” He looked back up at the image of Emily's terrified face. “It's also about helping a scared little girl.”

“Lining the pockets of the mother, more like,” muttered a voice from the crowd.

“You're wrong,” Robert replied, turning to him. “You're wrong, and I'm going to prove it.”

Chapter Six

Today

“Shit!”

Tripping over his own feet, he stumbled for a moment and finally slid down into a ditch by the side of the road.

“Damn it,” he muttered, as he started to pull himself out.

Taking a look at his watch, he had to squint for a few seconds before he was able to make out the display.

“Three?” he said to himself. “Only three? Why, the night is still young. We have many hours to go in our... boat of love and peace.”

With that, he leaned over and fell back into the ditch.

Chapter Seven

Twenty-four years ago

“To the great Doctor Robert Slocombe,” Jenna said, raising her glass of wine and clinking the edge against Robert's. “To the man who provided the first proof of these... things, whatever they are. These paranormal creatures.”

Smiling, Robert took a sip of wine as they sat in his dusty, cramped office, surrounded by shelves and piles of books.

“Let's not use words like 'paranormal' here,” he said after a moment. “One of the aims of my work is to show that these phenomena are part of the everyday world. They don't exist in some pocket of reality that's separate from the rest of nature. I don't want to move beyond science, I want to take these events and analyze them in a scientific manner.”

“Can I have your autograph?” she asked, grinning as she handed him a pen and a copy of yet another magazine with him and Emily on the cover. “Please, Doctor Slocombe?”

“You know you could have asked for my autograph in bed last night,” he replied, scribbling his name on the cover. “That wouldn't been even more of a compliment.”

“You can sign me tonight. Anywhere you want.”

“I could get used to this,” he told her. “I should start making groundbreaking discoveries all the time.”

“I knew you'd succeed eventually. I had faith in you, right from the start.”

“Even when I had all those failures?”

“They weren't failures,” she continued, “they were necessary steps on the road to success. I know it was hard sometimes, and I know there were plenty of idiots who told you the whole thing was a waste of time, but you stuck to your guns and you refused to stop. Now people are starting to take you seriously, and pretty soon you'll have a much bigger office, one with actual windows.”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” he replied, taking another sip of wine. “You have to be pretty highly-respected to get an office with windows around this place.”

Leaning closer, she kissed him for a moment.

“I know how much this work means to you,” she whispered finally. “I know how much you were ridiculed in the past for believing in this kind of thing. I can't even begin to tell you how much I admire you for sticking with it, even though so many people told you it was bullshit.”

“I just knew that I'd get the proof I needed one day,” he replied, before hearing a knock at the door. Setting his wine glass down, he made his way across the room. “Truth be told, I also knew, deep down, that Emily Stone would provide that proof. There was just something so genuine about her right from the start. I felt like I really understood her, and that I was able to talk to her on a useful level. The kid has been through so much, she's been forced to grow up extremely quickly.”

“You're good with kids,” she replied, with a glint in her eyes. “That's useful to know. For the future.”

Smiling, he opened the door and found Douglas waiting outside.

“Come to join the party?” Jenna called out.

“Not quite,” Douglas replied awkwardly. “Rob, do you mind if I have a word?”

“Come on in,” Robert replied, stepping aside and gesturing for him to enter. “I know it's only lunchtime, but Jenna insisted on a glass of wine to celebrate the latest developments. Did you hear that a journalist from TIME wants to talk to me about the Emily Stone case? This thing is becoming international, Doug. After so many false starts, we're finally getting somewhere. The mainstream media has noticed the work we're doing.”

“Jenna,” Doug said, turning to her, “do you mind if I speak to Robert alone for a moment?”

“You're kicking me out?”

“It's a sensitive matter.”

“Fine,” she replied, topping up her glass of wine before heading to the door, “but I meant what I said earlier, Rob. We're having a proper party on Friday night, with guests and champagne and everything. For once, I'm going to drag you out to face the public, whether you like it or not.”

“I swear,” Robert said as Jenna shut the door behind her, “she's more excited than I am. She was talking about the Nobel prize earlier.”

Heading over to the desk, Doug set down a tape recorder. He seemed worried, as if something was on his mind.

“It's all so surreal,” Robert continued. “My biggest concern right now is keeping Emily safe. Her mother seems to be keen on getting her story into one of the big national papers. I know they're dangling big financial offers in her face, but she needs to focus less on the bright lights of showbiz and more on the scientific rigor we need in order to -”

“Did you listen to the tapes?”

“The tapes of Emily?” Robert paused. “Only about a thousand times. Why?”

“To the very end?”

“Sure.” He waited for Doug to continue. “What's wrong?”

“What about the off-cuts? The sections of tape that were supposed to be empty?”

Robert stared at him for a moment. “Out with it.”

“At the end of the tape from January 5th,” Doug replied, “after the vomit and after Emily had been calmed down, her mother took her up to her room. That was when you phoned me, remember?”

“I remember.”

“And Mrs. Stone talked to Emily while they were up there.”

“And?”

“And the microphone picked up a faint trace of what they were talking about, once they thought no-one could overhear them.”

Robert set his glass of wine down. He was starting to worry about where the conversation was headed, but at the same time he knew that Douglas tended to be overly cautious. “And?”

“And I had that trace examined by a friend of mine who specializes in forensic acoustic analysis. He was able to enhance the recording so that we can hear exactly what was being said. Every word.”

Robert glanced down at the tape recorder.

“Robert, I hate to be the one who does this, but...” Pausing for a moment, Douglas hit a button on the machine, and the tape began to play.

“Doug -” Robert began.

“Just listen.”

“If you're -”

“Just listen!”

“Are you sure I did okay?” Emily could be heard saying, her voice barely audible over the hiss from the player. “I said everything right, didn't I?”

“You did really well,” Joyce replied. “When he's gone, we'll take some more photos, and then we need to start running through your story for when the papers come knocking, okay? We've got a hell of a payday coming. You're gonna be the most famous little girl in the whole of England.”

“But...” There was a pause. “Isn't it wrong to lie?” Emily asked finally.

“You weren't lying, you were exaggerating.”

“My throat hurts,” Emily continued. “I don't like having to make that voice. Do I have to practice again?”

“Don't be a baby,” Joyce told her. “I'll get you some ice cream to soothe the soreness.”

“I don't have to do it again, do I?”

“Come on, Emily, we've talked about this.” There was a brief ruffling sound. “The nice man believed you, and that's what's important. Everyone's gonna want a piece of you, sweetheart. We need to be careful, though. Don't want people snooping too much, do we?”

“Okay,” Robert said with a sigh, “sure, but -”

“There's more,” Douglas told him.

The tape continued, with no voices for a moment but still a faint crackling sound.

“The contact lenses hurt,” Emily could be heard saying finally. “They make my eyes sore.”

“Oh, relax,” Joyce replied. “You only have to have 'em in for a few minutes.”

“And the thing in my mouth got loose again. I almost swallowed it, I had to -”

“Enough.” Reaching out, Robert hit a button on the front of the recorder, stopping the tape. He stood in silence for a moment, staring down at the machine, before turning and heading over to his desk. For a moment, he felt strangely numb, as if all the thoughts had been chased out of his mind, but slowly he realized there was anger growing in his chest.

“You should listen to the rest,” Douglas told him. “It's quite an eye-opener, actually. Joyce Stone really knows how to get that little girl to play her part.”

Lost for words, Robert simply nodded.

“I'm so sorry that I had to be the one to break it to you,” Douglas continued. “Like you, I allowed myself to dare to dream that this haunting of Emily Stone might actually be something significant, but once we heard this part of the tape, we realized it's just another hoax. A good hoax, a brilliant one in many ways, but... still a hoax.”

“Clearly.”

Sighing, Douglas tried to think of something else to say, something that might ease his friend's sense of crushing disappointment. “There'll be other cases, Rob,” he said finally. “Come on, we're always so cautious, maybe you rushed into this one a little but it's okay, we all make mistakes, the key is to learn from them. We have to keep the faith. You can't let this one -”

“I spent six months on this case,” Robert replied, turning to him. “My name is out there, supporting the Emily Stone narrative. I put my career on the line to investigate their claims, I stood up in conference after conference and presented this evidence, and now... I'm going to look like an utter fool. What the hell was I thinking? How did I let some stupid woman and her snotty-nosed little kid pull the wool over my eyes like this?”

“There'll be other opportunities,” Douglas said again, although he clearly knew his words weren't helping. “Remember what we agreed, about not allowing ourselves to be disheartened when we faced the inevitable setbacks?” He paused, waiting for a reply. “What are you going to do now?”

“Now?” Staring at the tape recorder, Robert felt the anger starting to crystallize in his chest. “What am I going to do now? Hell, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to...” He paused, before grabbing a mug from his desk and throwing it across the room, until it banged against the bookcase and then dropped down harmlessly.

Chapter Eight

Today

“Jenna!” he screamed again, just as the upstairs light clicked on. “It's me!”

A moment later, the window slid open and a familiar, angry face leaned out.

“Hey Jenna,” he said with a smile. “It's four o'clock. Do you want to get a beer? I'm sure your old ball and chain won't even notice.”

“Is it him again?” a male voice called from inside.

“Oh shit,” Robert grinned. “He noticed.”

“Go away!” Jenna hissed. “Jesus Christ, Rob, you're wasted again!”

“I've only had a few ales,” he replied, “as the good gentleman once said in that film I can't remember the name of.”

“I can't cover your classes today,” she continued. “For God's sake, man, pull yourself together! You're embarrassing yourself!”

“No,” he replied, “you're embarrassing myself.” He paused, trying to work out what he meant to say. “Or am I embarrassing yourself? It's so hard to remember. Let's drink and forget all our troubles!”

“Go home,” she told him, “and for God's sake, drink some coffee before you get to bed. Trust me, you'll be glad you did in the morning. Or the afternoon, or whenever the hell you wake up.”

Sliding the window shut, she disappeared from view. A moment later, the light flicked off.

“What?” he said, still staring up at the side of the house. “No party? Suit yourself.”

Turning, he began to stumble along the street, although he soon lost his balance again and fell against the wall. As he tried to steady himself, he heard a door opening nearby.

“Robert!”

He looked over his shoulder and saw Jenna hurrying out to him, with a dressing gown wrapped tight around her body.

“Get inside,” she told him, reaching out and taking his hand. “You can sleep in the spare room this once. I can't let you wander off like this, God knows where you'd end up.”

“I thought I'd go and explore,” he replied. “You know, find somewhere new and take a look around.”

“You're too drunk to do any exploring. Come on, I'll make up the spare bed.”

“I knew it,” he said with a smile, allowing her to lead him into the house. “I knew you cared!”

Chapter Nine

Twenty-four years ago

Rain was pouring down as Joyce Stone opened her front door.

“You're a goddamn liar!” Robert shouted, barely protected from the deluge by the umbrella he was holding.

“Oh, piss off,” she replied, with a cigarette in her hand. She tried to shut the door, but Robert stepped forward and put his foot in the way.

“What was the point?” he asked. “Did you do it just to get a kick out of the attention, or was it for money, or did you just want to humiliate a few people, or -”

“You don't know what you're talking about,” Joyce replied, pulling the door back open and then trying to kick his foot out of the way. “Go on, fuck off. You've already done enough damage, telling the papers we're a bunch of fakes.”

“I've done enough damage?” he asked incredulously. “I've done enough? You're not just fakes, you're charlatans, liars -”

“I'm not listening,” she replied. “Get off my property or I'll call the police.”

“Mum?” a voice called out from inside the house.

“Go upstairs!” Joyce shouted.

Spotting Emily sitting on the stairs, Robert saw the fear in the little girl's eyes. For a moment, he felt sorry for her, before remembering that she'd been just as much part of the lie as her mother.

“I hope you're proud of yourselves,” he continued, turning back to Joyce. “Not only have you wasted six months of everybody's time with this massive hoax, but you've damn near destroyed my career, as well as any chance of having this kind of research taken seriously. I believed you! I'm always so cautious, but I had this feeling, deep down, that you were telling the truth. What kind of idiot does that make me?”

“Oh, bollocks,” Joyce hissed, “now are you gonna piss off, or do I have to call the police?”

“Was it worth it?” he asked. “Just answer that question for me, and then I'll leave and never come back. Was it all worth it?”

“Was what worth it?” she asked with a sigh.

“All the lies. How did you get Emily to fake that voice? It must have taken some work. You've spent six months living a complete lie, Joyce, and you've turned your daughter into a liar too. I'm not the only one who was fooled by you, either. Did you really think you could keep it going forever?”

He waited for a reply, but Joyce simply took an unimpressed drag on her cigarette, while Emily continued to watch from her position on the stairs. The little girl was shaking with fear, and her eyes were wide and filled with tears.

“For the rest of our lives,” Robert continued, “we'll all be linked to this. Whenever anyone hears my name, they'll remember me as the guy who was fooled into believing all this bullshit. And whenever they hear the names Joyce and Emily Stone, they'll just remember a pair of liars who thought they could cheat the world, and that reputation will follow you all the way to your graves. So was it really worth it, Joyce? Six months of fame, for a lifetime of infamy?”

“I'm sorry,” Emily called out to him.

“Go upstairs!” Joyce shouted at her.

Emily winced a little, but she stayed in her spot on the stairs.

“They were gonna give us two hundred grand,” Joyce told Robert finally, with a hint of spite in her voice. “Two hundred, it was gonna be like winning the bloody lottery. And now look at us, we've got nothing, and we're not gonna get another chance like that, 'cause people like us, we don't get ahead, we don't get big breaks! It was our one chance! For your information, the first couple of times it happened to Emily, it was all real. We just emphasized it a little for you, and you lapped it up. It's showbiz, innit?”

“You put on some very theatrical and imaginative illusions,” he told her, “but they were lies.”

“The first few times -”

“No-one believes you,” he continued, taking his foot out of the way of the door. “No-one will ever believe you. You'll go down in history as a pair of liars, and I'll go down in history as a fool. At first I wasn't sure which of us was worse off, but now I think -”

“Piss off,” Joyce said firmly, slamming the door shut so hard that the glass pane rattled. A moment later, she could be heard shouting at Emily, telling her to go to her room.

As rain continued to pour down, Robert stayed in front of the door for a moment, before turning and walking away. By the time he got to his car on the corner of the street, and despite the umbrella, he was soaked. He fumbled in his pockets for his keys, before glancing back one final time at the house. Whereas twenty-four hours ago he'd still been filled with excitement at the prospect of continuing his work with the Stones, now he felt broken inside. Some part of him had died when he'd realized that the haunting of Emily Stone was a hoax.

“I'm done,” he whispered. “I'm not wasting any more of my time on this bullshit.”

Chapter Ten

Today

Deep down, beneath the soil, the bones of a murdered woman waited to be found. Her head was tilted back a little and her mouth had been open when she died. The roots of a cherry tree had begun to grow between her ribs.

***

“Mummy! Mummy!”

“I'm coming!”

Fumbling in the darkness, she almost fell off the bed and then almost tripped over a pair of shoes she'd left on the floor. Reaching the door, she pulled it open and ran out in her nightgown before heading into Lizzie's room. As soon as she turned on the light, she saw that the place was a mess. Lizzie's bookshelf had been pushed over, and her curtains had been torn down, and Lizzie herself was sitting on the bed with tears running down her eyes.

“What is it?” Emily asked, hurrying over and sitting next to her. She ran her hands through the little girl's hair as she gave her a hug. “Did you have a nightmare?”

Lizzie shook her head.

“Then...” Pausing, Emily looked back across the room, half-expecting to see something. She knew the answer to the next question, but she had to ask it anyway, even though she could feel a sense of fear in her chest. “What happened, sweetie?”

“There was someone in here,” Lizzie whimpered, putting her arms around her mother's waist and squeezing tight.

Hearing movement in the main bedroom, Emily leaned down and kissed the top of Lizzie's head.

“I didn't do it,” Lizzie added.

“I know, sweetie, I know.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Of course not.”

“Didn't you hear it?” Lizzie asked, looking up at her. “It's really angry. Mummy, I don't want to sleep in here anymore. Can I sleep in with you?”

“I -” Emily paused for a moment. “You just had a bad dream.”

“It wasn't a dream.”

“It was,” she continued, “I promise, it was.” She glanced across the room again, just to make sure there was nothing. “There's nothing here.”

“There was a minute ago,” Lizzie continued. “There was a voice, it said it had climbed up to reach me -”

“Come on,” Emily replied, “you're just -” She stopped suddenly. “What did you say?”

“I'm scared,” Lizzie whispered.

“I know, but what did you just -”

Before she could finish, she heard footsteps on the landing, and she turned just in time to see Karl stepping into the doorway, rubbing the back of his head. He'd already managed to slip back into the clothes he'd shed so enthusiastically a few hours earlier, and he was clearly starting to sober up.

“She had another nightmare,” Emily told him.

“It wasn't a nightmare,” Lizzie whispered, eying Karl suspiciously.

“These are becoming a bit of a habit, aren't they?” Karl replied, still not quite awake. “What've you been up to in here, Lizzie? Looks like a bomb's gone off.”

“He doesn't believe me,” Lizzie continued, turning to look up at her mother. “Do you believe me?”

“I believe you had a nightmare,” Emily replied, her voice trembling a little as she glanced over at Karl. She was trying to stay calm, even though she couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. “I think -”

“I might head home,” he said, with an awkward smile. “Gotta be up early, n'all. They want me on-site at eight.”

“It's only three in the morning,” Emily pointed out.

“Yeah, but...” He paused. “You know I don't mind kipping here, but... Now I'm awake, I might as well get home. Don't worry, I'll get dressed and see myself out. I'll give you a call in the next few days, check how you're getting on. Maybe we can hit the pub again on Friday, if you can find someone to watch the little princess.”

“Wait -”

She watched as he headed away from the door, and a moment later she heard him gathering his things in the next bedroom. Karl always ran whenever there was a hint of Lizzie causing trouble, and she already knew deep down that he wasn't the kind of man who'd ever take on a single mother, not in any serious kind of way. She knew she had to end it with him, for Lizzie's sake if not her own.

“I'm sorry I woke you up,” Lizzie whispered, laying her head against her mother's chest. “I tried to be brave. I spent ages waiting before I made a noise but this time I heard...”

Emily waited for her to continue. “You heard what, sweetie?”

“A voice.”

“A -” Pausing, she felt a shiver pass through her body. She sat back, so she could see her daughter's face properly. “What kind of voice did you hear, Lizzie?”

“An angry one.”

“What was it saying?”

“I don't know. I couldn't hear it very well, but...” She paused. “It sounded like an angry monster. Like a woman who was really mad at me.” She looked across the room, her eyes filled with fear as she waited to see if one of the shadows might suddenly come to life. “She was really here. Mummy, I swear I'm not making it up, there's a woman who comes into my room at night and she does all these -”

“No,” Emily said firmly.

“Mummy, the -”

“No!” She paused, realizing she'd been a little too harsh. “There's no woman,” she added finally, feeling a little flustered. “You mustn't talk about things like that.”

“She's real,” Lizzie whispered, with tears in her eyes.

“You've just got an overactive imagination,” Emily told her. “That's all it is. I was the same when I was little. It's a good thing, but you need to learn to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.”

“You don't believe me,” Lizzie whimpered. “I knew you wouldn't. You never do.”

“It's okay,” Emily replied, spotting a dark patch on Lizzie's neck. Pulling the little girl's shirt aside, she saw a faint graze, and she knew instantly that there'd soon be another bruise. Too many more of those, and people would start talking. If they weren't already. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“One of the books hit me when it flew off the shelf.”

“When you pulled them off, you mean.”

Lizzie shook her head. “Mummy, the woman -”

“Stop it!” Emily shouted, finally losing her temper. “For God's sake, just -” Stopping herself just in time, she saw that Lizzie was starting to weep. Pulling her closer, she held her tight. “I'm sorry. Mummy shouldn't have snapped like that. I'm sorry, baby, really.”

“It's okay,” Lizzie whispered.

“It's not okay,” Emily said, still holding her tight. “None of this is okay.” She kissed the top of the girl's head again. “It hasn't been okay for a very long time.”

***

“It's not sometimes,” Karl replied, keeping his voice down as they stood at the front door a little while later, “it's every bloody night. I can't remember the last time I stayed over and she didn't end up doing something weird. Must be at least a fortnight.”

“She's going through a very difficult time,” Emily told him. “I told you, the divorce was rough on her, and even though I tried to shield her from the worst of it, she definitely picked up on some of the negative energy. She's always asking where her father is, she doesn't understand why he moved so far away.”

“So that's why she's waking up every night, shouting about a woman in her bedroom?”

Leaning through to look toward the kitchen, Emily saw that Lizzie was still at the kitchen table, eating a middle-of-the-night bowl of cereal.

“Have you thought about getting some help for her?” Karl asked finally.

She turned to him. “Like what?”

“Like a bloody psychiatrist. Someone who can fix her.”

“She doesn't need fixing!”

“Fine, but whatever's wrong with her -”

“There's nothing wrong with my daughter!” she hissed, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Lizzie couldn't hear, before turning back to him. “Don't ever say that again!”

“Sure there isn't,” he replied, lighting a cigarette as he stepped out into the night air. “Every kid screams in the middle of the night and claims to have seen a ghost in her bedroom. Does she know about you, Em?”

“What do you mean?”

“About your past. She's, what, twelve now? That's the same age you were, isn't it? Does she know the whole sad story about the haunting of Emily Stone?”

“There's no reason why she ever has to find out.”

“Unless some kids've been telling her at school. You can't keep it hidden forever. I bet you their parents have told them, so it's only a matter of time before she starts hearing whispers. Maybe she's already found out and she thinks it's funny to prank you?”

“She's not that kind of girl.”

“Mummy's little angel, eh?”

“I'm tired,” she replied, starting to find him intensely irritating. “I'll be in touch.”

Swinging the door shut before he could annoy her any further, she made her way wearily to the kitchen and then stopped for a moment so she could watch Lizzie eating. For a moment, she found herself actually considering the possibility – however ridiculous it seemed – that there really might have been something in her daughter's bedroom. She told herself that the idea was ridiculous, that she was just over-reacting, but in the back of her mind there was a faint doubt. After a few seconds, Lizzie glanced over at her and offered the faintest of smiles.

“You should go to bed soon,” Emily told her.

“Can I sleep in with you tonight?”

She nodded.

“Thank you. Can I also stay home from school tomorrow?”

She shook her head.

“Mummy, please -”

“You have to go,” Emily told her. “I've got two job interviews during the day, and...” She paused for a moment, running through a crazy notion in the back of her mind, before dismissing the whole thing. She knew she had to just focus on looking after Lizzy, and on hoping that the night terrors would soon pass, because that was all they were: night terrors. “It'll be okay. I promise.”

“I don't have to sleep in my room again, do I? Not ever?”

“Not for now,” Emily replied, forcing a smile. “Come on, let's get to bed. You'll be okay as long as you're in with me. I'd never let anything happen to you. I just...” She paused. “You haven't heard anything, have you? Any stories at school?”

“Like what?”

“Like...” Another pause. “Forget it. I'm tired and -” Hearing a faint creaking sound from upstairs, she glanced at the ceiling before telling herself that, for Lizzie's sake, she had to stay strong. “Come on. Let's go brush our teeth again.”

Chapter Eleven

“Kids today,” he muttered, taking a drag on his cigarette as he watched students making their way across the university's main lawn. “This university would be such a nice place if it wasn't for all the bloody students.”

***

“You'll have to forgive my friend,” Douglas said, glancing at the fresh-faced first years who'd gathered around his workbench. “He's become something of a skeptic in recent years. Almost a misanthrope, one might say.”

“And you'll have to forgive my friend,” replied Doctor Robert Slocombe, as he picked up and examined a coil generator. “He still believes in ghosts, ghouls and things that go bump in the night. In other words, childish things that he should have put away long ago. In fact, some might say -”

He winced as Douglas suddenly hit two pieces of metal together.

“Sorry, old man,” Douglas said with a smile. “Got a bit of a hangover, have you?”

“All the best men do.”

“Despite his lack of belief,” Douglas continued, turning to the students, “Doctor Slocombe persists in hanging around this lab like a bad smell. Sometimes I think he actually enjoys debunking every idea I'm working on.”

“Oh, I do,” Robert replied. “Truly.”

Some of the students began to smile nervously.

“I can't believe the university still lets you do this stuff,” Robert continued, making his way over to join them. “Aren't they worried about it bringing down the tone of the place? This is supposed to be a serious university that supports serious research, and here you are, inducting another set of volunteers who've got nothing better to do with their lunchtimes than pretend all this crap is actual science.”

“The faculty tolerates us,” Douglas muttered. “They certainly don't encourage anything.” Turning to the students, he sighed. “Many moons ago, Doctor Slocombe and I, along with Doctor Jenna Riseborough, started the Paranormal Investigative Unit as a project that would allow us to look into reports of unexplained, possibly supernatural activity in the region. In fact, you might be surprised to learn that our arch-skeptic Doctor Slocombe was once a very keen member of the group, keener than the rest of us. He was the guiding force of our early work.”

“Until I saw the light,” Robert said with a faint smile.

“Until he had a rather unfortunate experience,” Douglas added.

“What happened?” one of the students asked.

“How old are you?” Robert replied, turning to her.

“Twenty.”

“God, you make me feel ancient,” he continued. “Well, let's just say that a few years before you were even born, I was disabused of my notions concerning such things. I realized that chasing ghosts was no way for a man to go about his life, and I moved on to more respectable endeavors. Drinking, frequenting dark boozers, that sort of thing.”

“Have you guys ever heard of the Emily Stone case?” Douglas asked. He waited for one of the students to reply, but they all stared back at him blankly and finally he sighed. “Jesus, and you claim to be interested in this kind of thing? The Emily Stone case, people!”

Again, no-one bit.

“Leave it be,” Robert muttered. “It's in the past.”

“The Emily Stone case,” Douglas continued, “was big news twenty-four years ago. It was on the front pages of several national papers, people were even talking about it on TV.”

“Wait,” one of the students said after a moment, “you mean that big hoax?”

“That big hoax,” Robert said with a faint smile. “Got it in one.”

“So that was you?” another of the students asked. “Seriously?”

“Until the Emily Stone case,” Douglas continued, “Doctor Robert Slocombe was a passionate supporter of the work we do here. After the Emily Stone case, not so much. He joined the other side and became an arch-skeptic.”

“I took a more realistic view,” Robert replied.

“You gave up,” Douglas retorted.

“But the Emily Stone thing was a hoax, wasn't it?” another student asked. “I think I remember reading about it once and it was pretty much debunked, right? It was all shown to be a lie. All the photos were staged, and the kid had some homemade voice changing thing shoved down her throat.”

“Exactly,” Robert said. “It was a lie, like every other so-called haunting.”

“Some of us dusted ourselves down and carried on with the work,” Douglas continued. “We put our bruised egos aside and focused on the fact that it's the work that matters.”

“And some of us realized we were chasing shadows,” Robert retorted, “and that there were better uses for our time.” He reached past Douglas and picked up another piece of equipment, examining it for a moment before setting it down and turning to the students. “I hate to break this to you, kids, but there's no such things as ghosts. I used to be just like you, but one day I realized that in the cold light of day, all the evidence was tainted by my own desire to believe. Once I lost that desire, I saw it for what it was. Lies, hoaxes and mistakes. In other words, bullshit.”

“You don't think there's even a chance?” one of the students asked.

“Not a hope in hell,” he replied. “Trust me, this whole thing is a fool's game. The Emily Stone case helped me to see the light. The only people who claim to believe in that kind of crap are idiots and liars.” He turned to Douglas. “Or hopeless romantics.”

“Thanks,” Douglas muttered, rolling his eyes as he got back to work.

“What happened to her?” asked one of the students.

“Who?” Robert turned to him. “Emily Stone?” He paused. “I honestly don't know. I don't care, either. Wherever she is and whatever she's doing, I just hope she's moved past all that ghost crap.”

Chapter Twelve

“I have experience working checkouts,” Emily continued, sitting in the manager's office the following morning, “so it wouldn't be a problem for me to get up to speed with whatever system you use. I'm a quick learner and I'm very motivated to learn new skills. Whatever you throw at me, I can...”

She paused, aware that the man on the other side of the desk didn't seem to be listening to a word she said.

“I can adapt,” she added, “and, um, I think I'm good at working with people, I'm customer-orientated and I can take the initiative when challenges arise.”

She waited for him to say something.

Instead, he leaned closer to his laptop and squinted slightly.

“Are you... still interested in hiring me?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” he replied, evidently paying more attention to the screen than to her answers. He clicked his mouse a couple of times, followed by a faint smile. “And, er...” He briefly began to laugh, before holding himself back. “And what about stock-taking, Ms. Stone? How are you....” He paused yet again, staring at the screen, before turning back to her. “Where was I? Oh yeah, stock-taking. Any good?”

“I've done it before.”

She waited eagerly for him to reply, but something on the screen seemed to have completely absorbed his attention. His smile was growing, and after a moment he clicked through to the next screen and chuckled.

“Is everything okay?” she asked finally.

“Yeah,” he replied, “just...” He paused, before glancing at her. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Go for it.”

Leaning forward, he grabbed the screen and began to turn it toward her. “Is this really you?”

Even before she saw the image, she knew what it would be: one of the photos from twenty-four years ago, showing her apparently suspended in mid-air, or screaming in her bedroom. Those were the same images that had been on the front-page of the local paper when the story had first blown up, and they were the same images that had been plastered everywhere when the story had been exposed as a hoax.

“Well, is it?” he asked, starting to chuckle. “Are you that Emily Stone?”

“I am,” she replied, trying not to get too tense. “It was a long -”

“Bloody hell,” he continued, clicking to the next picture, which showed a close-up of her screaming face. “Bloody hell, I knew I recognized the name when you came in just now, but... I mean, you don't mind talking about it, do you?”

“No, but...” She paused, as she realized she was starting to feel intensely uncomfortable. “I don't see what it has to do with the interview.”

“Course not,” he replied, “but we always like to get an idea of our prospective employees' personal lives and -” He clicked through to another picture, and immediately started laughing as he saw a photo of young Emily sobbing in her mother's arms. “I'm sorry,” he continued, “really, I know I shouldn't be looking at this stuff, but... Jesus, it's insane, isn't it? It all turned out to be a hoax, yeah?”

She nodded.

“So, what, did your mother put you up to it? That's what the papers said.”

“Something like that.”

“I guess it is relevant really,” he continued, leaning back in his chair “You know, it reflects on your character if you've done a lot of lying in the past.”

“I didn't lie,” she replied, before realizing that her protest was hopeless. “I was twelve years old. People can be be persuaded to do dumb things when they're twelve.”

“I know, I know.” Turning the monitor back to face himself, he clicked the mouse a couple more times. Falling silent, he was clearly looking at more of the photos. “Bloody hell,” he whispered after a moment. “They look real and fake at the same time. How'd you do the ones where it looks like you're being dragged backwards through the air?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Some of 'em look like something's pulling you back across the room, right through the air. How'd you make those ones look so realistic back in the day, without stuff like Photoshop?”

“I...” She paused. “My mother taught me, that's all. It took a lot of practice. She made it fun.”

“What about the black vomit that came out of your mouth?”

“That was...” She took a deep breath. “Sachets I had to burst with my tongue. Filled with various things.”

“And did you end up making a lot of money out of the whole thing?” he asked. “I mean, obviously not that much, or you wouldn't be here applying for a checkout job, but... Did you at least get a big payday from the papers for all of this?”

She shook her head.

“Bugger. So if the -”

“Have I got the job or not?” she asked, feeling as if she was on the verge of running out of the office. “Sorry, I didn't mean to say it like that, I just... I know it's minimum wage, but I really need it, and I swear you won't regret hiring me, not for a second.”

“You've got a kid, yeah?”

She nodded.

“Single mum?”

She nodded again.

“Yeah...” He paused. “Well, I've still got a few people to see -”

“So I haven't got a chance?”

“Hang on,” he added, getting to his feet and heading past her, toward the door. “I'll be back in a couple of minutes.”

Once he'd left the room, she tried to focus and stay calm. The whole poltergeist hoax drama had been following her all her life, and this wouldn't be the first time it'd caused problems when she was applying for a job. No matter how much time passed, everyone seemed to always remember the story of little Emily Stone and the so-called haunting that turned out to be a big hoax. She'd even begun to consider changing her name by deed-poll, although she was reluctant to let the idiots win. After a moment, hearing laughter nearby, she turned and saw the manager out in the corridor, watching her along with a couple of other people in suits.

“Screw this,” she muttered, grabbing her bag and CV, and storming out the door.

“Wait,” the manager called after her, “we were only having a bit of fun! We were laughing with you, not at you!”

By the time she got outside, she could barely breathe. Stopping on a bench next to the edge of the car park, she sat down and tried to pull herself together. She knew she shouldn't have walked out, but at the same time she also knew what it would be like working at a supermarket while gossip and laughs slowly spread among her co-workers. It had been the same everywhere she'd ever worked, and as a result she'd never held down a job for more than six months. Sometimes, she felt as if the whole world knew who she was.

Hearing some kids singing the Ghostbusters theme, she looked over her shoulder and saw they were at the bus stop, laughing at her. She wiped tears from her eyes as she got to her feet and hurried away.

***

“Lizzie?” she called out, as the last of the children made their way out past the school gate. “Lizzie, sweetie?”

As other mothers watched with slight concern, Emily tried not to panic. Lizzie was usually one of the first kids to reach the gate, but now it seemed as if everyone was out and there was still no sign of her.

“Lizzie! Lizzie, where are you?”

“Ms. Stone?”

Turning, she saw that one of Lizzie's teachers had come over.

“Would you mind coming inside?” the teacher asked. “Mrs. Wilson would like to talk to you about your daughter.”

***

“I'm sure you'll understand that we're just concerned for Lizzie's welfare,” said the headmistress a short while later, as she smiled first at Emily and then at Lizzie. “In the circumstances, we felt the best approach would be to ask you to come in for a little chat. To keep things informal.”

“Is she being bullied?” Emily asked. Reaching over to the next chair, she put a hand on Lizzie's arm, but she noticed her daughter seemed strangely cool and detached.

“One of the teachers noticed a bruise on Lizzie's neck,” the headmistress continued. “It's... not the first bruise that has been spotted on your daughter, Ms. Stone, and unfortunately Lizzie's explanation when she was asked... Well, it aroused concern.”

“I'm sorry,” Lizzie said quietly, turning to Emily. “Please don't be mad at me.”

“Of course I'm not mad,” she replied, leaning over to kiss the top of her head before looking back at the headmistress. “What exactly did she say?”

“That she wasn't allowed to tell us what had happened. That you wouldn't want her to tell us.”

Sighing, Emily began to realize how bad the situation looked.

“I understand that Lizzie's father is no longer around?”

“He moved back to Edinburgh after the divorce,” Emily explained. “He doesn't get down to see Lizzie very much these days. Or at all, really. He calls sometimes.”

“So it's just the two of you in the house now?”

She nodded.

“I see.” The headmistress paused for a moment. “Lizzie did say, however, that sometimes you have guests over -”

“Very rarely.”

“Male friends?”

“Only one at a time,” Emily replied, before realizing how bad that sounded. “I mean, I have boyfriends occasionally, but only one at any given time. Only one boyfriend. It's not like...” Her voice trailed off as she realized she was panicking and digging a deeper hole for herself.

“Do you ever leave Lizzie alone with your boyfriends?”

“What are you suggesting?” she asked.

“I'm just trying to understand your daughter's situation at home.”

“No-one hits her,” Emily replied, trying not to sound too defensive. “No-one has ever laid a finger on her.” She turned to Lizzie. “Tell them.”

“No-one hits me,” Lizzie said meekly, although there was a hint of fear in her voice.

“It's going to be okay,” Emily told her, reaching out and taking her hand.

“You're trembling,” Lizzie whispered.

“We have a statutory duty to investigate any concerns about a child's welfare,” the headmistress continued, “and, where those concerns persist, to report them to the relevant authorities. You must understand, Ms. Stone, that in many ways are hands are tied and we have strict rules to follow.”

“Lizzie just...” Pausing, Emily tried to work out whether the truth or a lie would sound more absurd. “She's been having certain experiences lately,” she added finally. “When she's alone in her bedroom, or sometimes in my bedroom, she... She says things happen. I've got it under control, the bruise on her neck is just an unfortunate accident.”

“Experiences?” There was a pause. “Would these be... experiences of a so-called paranormal nature?”

Emily sighed.

“I'm aware of your history,” the headmistress continued. “Ms. Stone, I'm sure I don't need to tell you -”

“No, you don't.”

“We take this kind of thing very seriously.”

“So do I!”

“No-one is being accused of anything. I'm not suggesting for one second that Lizzie's bruises are the result of malicious activity or -”

“We can't afford to move.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Emily sighed. “We're stuck in that house.”

“What does the house have to do with anything?”

“I...” She paused. “Nothing. I guess, I...”

They sat in silence for a moment.

“Ms. Stone,” the headmistress said finally, with a frown, “are you okay?”

Emily nodded.

“I understand, Ms. Stone, that being a single mother can -”

“I'm working on it,” Emily replied, interrupting her. She was close to tears but determined not to cry. “It's been hard, but I'm working on it. The only thing I care about is keeping Lizzie safe.”

“I appreciate that.”

“And I'm trying to get help.”

“For what?”

“For -” Pausing, Emily realized once again that the truth might be unpalatable. Then again, she wasn't even sure what was true, not anymore. “I... I mean...”

“Are you saying that Lizzie is causing these bruises herself?”

“No, of course not, I -”

“So someone else is causing them?”

Sighing, Emily saw that the headmistress's hand had moved closer to the phone on her desk.

“Sometimes children just get bruises,” Emily said, although she instantly hated herself for those words. “You know how it is, right? They play a little rough and they get a bruise. It's nothing, but then if it happens a couple of times in quick succession, suddenly they mount up and it starts looking like something else.” She kept her eyes on the woman's hand, hoping and praying that she wouldn't pick up the phone and call someone. “I'll make sure she's more careful. Really, I swear, nothing untoward is happening, it's just a little run of bad luck and I can assure you that it won't happen again. I'll make her play more carefully.”

The headmistress paused, before moving her hand away from the phone. “If we have any further concerns in the future -”

“You won't.”

“But if we do, Ms. Stone, we'll be legally obliged to follow them up with the relevant authorities. It'll be out of our hands.”

“Nothing's going to happen,” Emily replied, getting to her feet. “I know how to look after my daughter and I'm going to keep her safe from...” She paused, trying to find the right words. “She won't get one more bruise, I swear. Not one. She's just a normal little girl, so of course she's bumped herself once or twice, but she'll be okay from now on. If I have to wrap her up in cotton wool, I'll do it. Whatever it takes.”

“I'm sure,” the headmistress replied, before turning to Lizzie. “Just remember, you can come and see one of the teachers at any time, okay? If anything's worrying you at all, if there's anything you want to talk about, you mustn't be afraid. Do you understand? You can always come to us.”

Lizzie stared at her for a moment, before nodding.

“Come on,” Emily said, taking her daughter's hand. “It's late. We should get home.”

***

A few minutes later, having left Lizzie outside to play on the swings, Emily sobbed quietly in a bathroom cubicle. All the toilets were slightly lower than normal, for the children.

Chapter Thirteen

“What about paranormal phenomena as a symptom of mental illness?” asked Julie, one of the brighter students, from her usual spot on the front row of the lecture hall. “Schoepenhauser and Stiller both argue that people with undiagnosed psychiatric issues can manifest their internalized conflicts by imagining supernatural encounters.”

“Well...” Pausing for a moment, Robert took another sip of water. His head was throbbing and he was barely able to fight the urge to throw up after another heavy drinking session the night before. “That's a perfectly valid point,” he said finally, almost tripping on one of the steps as he made his way back to the main desk, “and there's certainly some convincing literature regarding externalization processes, but I think we're straying a little from today's subject.”

“What if it can be used in a diagnostic setting, though?”

“Well, again -”

Suddenly, his mind seemed to empty. He was aware of all the students staring at him, waiting for him to continue, but he could barely remember what he was supposed to be talking about. Turning to Julie, he saw that her infernally perky smile was fading a little, as if she could tell that something was wrong. Finally, from somewhere in the back of his mind, he began to start scrambling some coherent thoughts together.

“It's true,” he continued, “that some forms of mental illness can be expressed, often involuntarily, through claims of, er, paranormal activity. A kind of desperation, perhaps, sets in and -”

“Like the Emily Stone case?”

He paused again. Of all the days, this was not the time for the Stone case to come up in class. For some reason, however, Emily's name seemed to have been popping up in conversation a lot over the previous few days.

On the back row, a couple of students giggled at something.

“The Stone case is a little different,” he said cautiously, “because of the nature of the mother-daughter bond and the degree to which one mind can be controlled by another. A child is a very different proposition to an adult, when we're talking about suggestiveness and emotional malleability. You could write a whole book on the subject, and as I pointed out a moment ago, we're really straying off today's topic.”

“I know,” Julie continued, “but in this week's reading, Mendel argued that the parent-child relationship can give rise to particularly strong beliefs in paranormal events, particularly within the home setting.”

He nodded, trying to think of a way to shut down this particular brand of the conversation.

“Did you really believe them?” asked another student, Michael.

Robert turned to him.

“Sorry,” he continued, with a faint smile, “but... I was just wondering... Did you really believe the Stones, right up until the moment you found out they were faking the whole thing? I mean, I know it was almost twenty-five years ago, but a few of us were talking last night and we couldn't help wondering, like, at what point you started to have doubts.” He paused. “Some of the photos look kind of fake. Like, it's hard to believe anyone took them seriously, but apparently you spent six months on the case, absolutely convinced that there was a ghost in their house.”

“That's not quite correct,” he replied. “I believed there was some form of phenomena that merited further investigation.”

More giggles from the back row.

“What you have to remember,” he continued, “is that...” He paused. What? What did they have to remember? He looked over at his notes, then back at the faces of the students. Those last couple of whiskeys the night before had been a real mistake. “What you have to remember is that Joyce Stone had trained her daughter to lie, to pretend that these things were happening. It was much the same way that a circus trainer gets an animal to perform certain tricks. Now, I'm not saying that Emily was of sub-normal intelligence, or that Joyce was some kind of master manipulator, but in that setting, the manipulation was relatively easy. And very difficult to detect.”

“But the photos of Emily flying across the room,” Michael replied after a moment, “and of a blur in the doorway... Aren't they, kind of, obviously fake? When you look at them today, I mean.”

“They look like something out of a really bad horror movie,” added another student.

“You need to see them in context,” Robert replied, as he realized he was starting to sweat. “There was no Photoshop back then, and there was a lot of evidence at the time that suggested -”

“Like the voices?” asked a student near the front, mimicking the distorted, demonic voice that had come from Emily's mouth all those years ago.

The students started laughing.

“I need an exorcist!” the student continued, his voice becoming more and more twisted. “Somebody help me! I'm possessed by a spirit!”

“That's enough,” Robert said, trying not to let them see that he was feeling extremely uncomfortable.

“But that name Drella,” Michael added, “was obviously just a bastardization of the title Cinderella, which was one of the books on the little girl's nightstand.”

“I...” Pausing, Robert stared at him for a moment. “What?”

“In one of the famous photos. There are some books on the nightstand. One of them's Cinderella. Isn't that obviously where the little girl got the name Drella from?”

“Well...” Pausing again, Robert thought back to the various images. How, he wondered, had he spent so many hours analyzing them, and he'd never made the most obvious connection? “I don't think there's much point going back into that whole thing now,” he said finally. “It was what it was, and it all happened a long time ago. It's in the past.”

“Unless it was real,” Julie suggested.

He turned to her.

“At the start, I mean.” She paused. “Wasn't there a suggestion by the mother, after it all got exposed, that the very first reports about the ghost were true?”

“I think she would probably have said anything at that point to save face,” Robert replied. “The woman had, after all, just been exposed as a scheming liar who was manipulating her daughter in order to make money. Let's not try rewriting history here, guys. The Emily Stone haunting was a hoax from start to finish. End of story.”

“But if the little girl -”

“Enough!” He clapped his hands together. “These little diversions can be fun, but I think we'd all like to get on with the work that's relevant to your upcoming essays, wouldn't we? Let's leave the story of Emily Stone and her hoaxed haunting in the past, where it belongs.”

***

Forty minutes later, with class having ended for the morning, Doctor Robert Slocombe was on his knees in the bathroom, throwing up.

Chapter Fourteen

“Have you been crying?”

“What?” Turning away from the cooker for a moment, Emily realized she didn't know how long Lizzie had been watching from the kitchen door. “No, of course not,” she continued, forcing a smile. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“Wash your hands, dinner's ready.”

Lizzie paused for a moment, before heading through to the bathroom.

Reaching up, Emily wiped her eyes, checking for any errant tears that might have been left behind.

“Get a grip,” she told herself, before glancing at the ceiling and imagining the bedroom directly above the kitchen. “There's nothing here. It's all a lie. It was always a lie.”

***

“Mummy! Mummy!”

“What?” Waking suddenly and opening her eyes, Emily looked around the dark room for a moment before realizing that Lizzie was nudging her shoulder. “What is it, sweetie?”

“It's in there again.”

She paused for a moment. “What are you talking about?”

“Listen.”

They lay in silence for a moment.

“Lizzie, there's -”

“I heard it!” she whispered.

“I think this time it was probably a dream, okay?” Reaching out through the darkness, she stroked the girl's head and then glanced at the clock by the bed. “Come on, it's the middle of the night, don't -”

Before she could finish, she heard a clear, solid bumping sound coming from the other side of the wall, from Lizzie's bedroom.

“It's in there again,” Lizzie whispered, gripping Emily's night-shirt and pulling her closer.

Emily stayed completely still, as she felt her heart starting to pound in her chest. She told herself that Lizzie was just a little girl with a strong imagination, that all little girls had night terrors now and again, but deep down she couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. A moment later, she heard another bump and turned back to look at the wall, as she felt Lizzie's arms tightening around her waist.

“Can we go and stay with Grandma?” the little girl whimpered. “I'm scared.”

“I don't think Grandma would be very helpful right now,” Emily replied, looking over at the door for a moment. More than anything, she wanted to suddenly realize what had caused the noise, to remember that she'd left a window open or to realize that the neighbor's cat had managed to sneak inside again. In fact, once she'd discounted those two possibilities, she even began to hope that there was a burglar, since at least that would be something grounded, something she could deal with in rational terms. A moment later, however, she heard another bump from Lizzie's room, and she realized with a cold sweat that she was going to have to go and take a look.

That's what parents did. They took charge.

“Mummy...”

“Wait here,” she told Lizzie. As she tried to get out of bed, however, she felt her daughter pulling her back.

“Don't go!” Lizzie whispered.

“It's nothing,” she replied, trying not to sound scared. “Just stay here, I'll be back in two seconds.”

Slipping free of Lizzie's grasp, she made her way cautiously across the dark room and then pulled the door open. Glancing back, she saw Lizzie's terrified face watching her with wide-open eyes.

“There's nothing to be scared of,” she continued. “Just wait right here.”

Slipping through the door and then pulling it shut, she made her way along to Lizzie's room, where the door was already partway open. Had she left it open earlier, or had it managed to open itself? She honestly couldn't remember, but as she got closer she realized she could hear a faint rustling sound from inside. Reaching out, she was about to take hold of the handle when she heard a faint bumping sound coming from inside the dark room, following by what seemed to be a whisper.

She froze for a moment.

Something was definitely talking on the other side of the door.

“No,” she said to herself quietly, trying to find some courage from somewhere. “Just... No!”

With her hand still almost on the handle, she took a half-step forward and leaned toward the door. Turning to one side, she stopped once her ear was almost touching the wood, and she listened.

Someone was in there, whispering furiously.

“Oh God,” Emily mouthed, not making a sound.

A moment later, she heard a creaking sound further along the landing. Looking back, she saw Lizzie leaning out of the main bedroom, and she quickly waved for her to go back inside.

“What is it?” Lizzie whispered. “Mummy, is there-”

“Go to bed!” Emily hissed.

As she watched Lizzie reluctantly going back into the other room, Emily realized the whispering sound had stopped. She waited, and a moment later there came a new noise: a faint creak from the floorboards on the other side of the door, followed by another, then another, getting closer. It was as if, whatever was in there, it knew Emily was listening.

She looked down at the handle, daring herself to push the door open.

On three, she told herself. One. Two.

She paused.

Three.

She paused again, still trying to find the courage as her heart raced in her chest.

And then, slowly, the door began to creak open, inch by inch, revealing the darkness within until it was open all the way.

Emily stared ahead with terrified anticipation.

There was nothing in there.

She waited a moment longer, before taking a step forward. The bookcase was still overturned and the room was still a mess, just as she and Lizzie had left it a day earlier. They'd been putting off the big clean-up job, and even the bed was still messy. She flicked the light switch but found that it wasn't working; she tried a couple more times, and then she made her way to the window, hoping against hope that somehow it might be open, and that there'd be muddy paw prints on the sill, but it was closed and locked, just as she'd feared. Turning, she looked back across the room.

For a moment, just one brief moment, she thought she could see a figure standing right behind her. Something dark and tall, something staring straight at her.

Something she'd seen once before, when she was a child.

She blinked, and it was gone.

“Mummy?” Lizzie called out from the main bedroom. “Are you coming back?”

“Yeah,” she whispered, hurrying to the door before turning and looking across the room again. She waited, as if she expected something to make its presence known, and then she stepped out onto the landing and pulled the door shut.

***

By the time dawn arrived, Emily had quietly climbed out of bed and left Lizzie sleeping. Down in the front room, she'd fired up her laptop and begun to do some research, looking at images she'd spent the past twenty-four years trying to forget.

“Tortured by evil forces?” asked one headline, on a newspaper front-page that had been scanned and posted online. “A little girl and her mother from the north of England say their house is haunted by a terrifying poltergeist that has been making their lives miserable.”

Shuddering at the memory of those days, Emily clicked through to another image, this time showing a front-page from the day after the hoax was exposed.

“Liars!” the headline shouted. “Coltreath haunting exposed as clever hoax!”

She remembered those days like they were yesterday. The shame, the humiliation, and her mother's furious anger. Finding a link to a forum for ghost-hunters, she clicked through and found that even as recently as a year ago, people had been discussing the case.

“They were just after money,” one forum member had written. “No big mystery there.”

“The mother was a fucking liar,” replied another, “and the kid was a dumb little shit.”

“Once a liar, always a liar,” added yet another. “I used to feel sorry for the girl, but then I figured, she was old enough to know better.”

Scrolling down, she was shocked to see a photo of Doctor Robert Slocombe. He'd been handsome back in the old days, but the years clearly hadn't been kind. Now, he had the puffy, reddened, slightly bloated face of a man who drank too much, and she felt there was a hint of sadness in his eyes. According to one forum member, Slocombe had been asked at a conference about the Emily Stone hoax, and he'd responded “irascibly and with obvious anger”. She felt a shudder in her chest as she realized the hoax must have left him humiliated.

“Mummy?”

Turning, she saw that Lizzie was standing in the doorway.

“I woke up and you weren't there,” Lizzie said. “Why did you leave me?”

“I was only gone a minute or two,” Emily replied, closing the laptop lid before her daughter reached her for a hug. “It's okay. Everything's going to be fine. I'm going to fix it.”

***

“She's been outside a bit more,” added the nurse as they made their way along the corridor at the nursing home. “We're trying to get her to socialize a little more, but it's taking time. She's also very annoyed about the ban on smoking inside. She hates the nicotine gum, and she keeps setting off the smoke alarms by lighting up inside.”

“Sorry about that,” Emily muttered. Reaching the door to the common area, she immediately spotted her mother over on the far side, sitting alone in her wheelchair and looking out at the garden. All the other residents were at the main table, playing cribbage, but as usual Joyce Stone was excluding herself.

“I think it'd be good for her to join in,” the nurse continued. “If you could try to encourage her, that'd be great. Unfortunately, at the moment it seems like she prefers being by herself. If she'll just get talking to the rest of them, I'm sure she'll start to get a few friends.”

Making her way across the room, Emily said hello to a few of the other residents before reaching her mother, who didn't seem to have noticed her arrival.

“Hey, mum,” she said finally, setting a pot of flowers down on the table. “I brought you something.”

No reply.

“It's a nice day out there,” she continued, putting her coat on the back of a chair and then taking a seat. “If you like, I can take you into the garden for a while. Would you like that? It'd be better than sitting in here.”

She waited.

Nothing.

“I spoke to Stan, he said he'd be along to see you tomorrow.”

Again, no reply.

“I think...”

Taking a deep breath, Emily paused for a moment to check that no-one was close enough to overhear them. Turning back to her mother, she saw that the old woman was still staring out the window with pale, milky eyes.

“Lizzie's starting to say that she can see things in the house,” Emily continued finally. “I need you to tell me what it was like for me, when I first started to...” She paused again, trying to find the right words. “I know it's probably nothing, but I'm worried about her. Mum, please, can you just look at me for a moment? This is important!”

Joyce sniffed, but she made no effort to even acknowledge Emily's presence.

“Some of the things Lizzie is saying,” Emily continued, “remind me of things I remember from when I was her age. I can't talk to anyone about this, because they all just think I'm a liar, but I need you to help me work out what was real and what wasn't. It's all kind of muddled together in my head, and I can't sort it out. That's your fault, you know. You put so many lies in my mind, I don't even know what really happened.”

She waited.

Silence.

“Mum, please...”

Silence.

“The very start of it all,” Emily said with a sigh, “that was real, wasn't it? I remember it being real, but it's hard to really sort things out. There was something in that house, wasn't there? It stopped when we started with the hoax, I don't know why, but...”

She waited.

No reply.

“Is it possible,” she continued, “that it might have returned? That it might have, I don't know, woken up or stirred? Maybe after all these years, it's back, and this time it's going after Lizzie.”

Again, she waited.

Again, no reply.

“Or was it all bullshit?” she asked finally. “Come on, at least tell me that. I remember things happening, but is that a lie? Was any of it true?”

Sighing, she reached over and grabbed the side of her mother's wheelchair. Before she could turn the chair to face her, however, Joyce reached down and slapped her hand away.

“Mum!”

“Did you bring my ciggies?” Joyce asked.

“Mum, this is -”

“Where are they?”

“You're not allowed cigarettes here,” Emily reminded her. “Please, can we just -”

“Lot of fucking use you are, then,” Joyce replied, pointedly turning to look away. “Can't even bring me the one thing I actually enjoy.”

“Mum -”

“It's alright for you. I can see you're doing alright. You've put on weight, you know. Wouldn't be surprised if you get a double chin soon.”

“Can we talk about Lizzie and the house?”

“After everything I did for you, you can't even bring me some Marlboros.”

“Was it real?” she asked. “Mum, I just need to know this one thing. The way I remember it, is that the very first few times, something actually happened. Everything after that was you trying to get a big payday from the papers, but right at the start...” She waited for a reply. “Please. Just tell me whether I'm right or not. If there was really something in the house back then, it might come back now and go after Lizzie.”

She waited.

“Or am I imagining things?” Emily asked. “Mum, I'm really struggling here, I don't even know what's real and what isn't. Am I mis-remembering what happened all those years ago? Was the whole thing a hoax, from start to finish? Please, I'm not angry, I just need to know the truth. I have so many memories knocking about in my head, and I don't know where to start telling the true ones from the lies. I know you remember, so please... Just this once, talk to me.”

Again, she waited.

“I should have had more kids,” Joyce said finally. “Then again, I didn't know you were gonna turn out like this, did I? Got a job yet?”

“Mum -”

“Course not. You were always a flaky kid. I don't know why anyone'd hire someone like you.” She sniffed again. “Never reliable, that's your problem. Even back then, I told you exactly what you had to do, but you never did it right. Cost us our big shot, you did, and now look at us. I'm not surprised Brad left you, he can do a lot better. You're getting frumpy. No-one likes frumpy.”

Emily opened her mouth to reply, before realizing that there was no point. Grabbing her coat, she got to her feet. “I can't stay today,” she explained. “I've got things to do.”

“Course you have,” Joyce muttered. “Don't let me keep you. God forbid you'd spend more than five minutes with your old mother, the woman who sacrificed everything to raise you.”

“I'll be back tomorrow or the day after. Lizzie's not well and I need to keep an eye on her.”

“Spoiled little brat, that girl. You won't do her any good by hovering all the time.”

“Thanks for the parenting tips,” Emily replied, turning and heading back across the room. When she reached the door, she glanced at her mother again and saw that she was still sitting by the window, still looking out at the garden. It had been a long shot, hoping that the old woman would actually help, but she'd had to try. Now she had only one option left, and it was someone she really, really didn't want to have to call.

Chapter Fifteen

“Unfortunately,” Doctor Robert Slocombe said as he slid the essay across the desk, back toward Rachel, “that's exactly what I'm saying. A complete rewrite, from the first word.”

“It's that bad?” she asked, picking up the essay and seeing spidery red corrections scrawled all over her neat, printed black text. She stared in shock for a moment, before swallowing hard.

“It's not about being bad,” he replied, “it's about being academically rigorous. You're a good student and it's usually a pleasure to read your work, but on this occasion you've drifted into unsupported arguments and weak, flowery points that undermine you entire hypothesis. Which, by the way, was wafer-thin at the start. I appreciate that you wanted to try something new, to bush the boundaries of accepted knowledge, but you picked the wrong way to go. Don't be too ambitious.”

“But I thought -”

“I know exactly what you thought,” he continued. “You thought you'd come up with a wonderful new idea. Well, I'm afraid you went out on a limb and it didn't work. Don't try to change the world, Rachel. Just write an essay, stick to the accepted ideas, and collect your good grade at the end.”

“There goes my weekend,” she muttered, flicking through the rest of the pages and seeing that there were crossings-out and underlinings in every paragraph.

“Sometimes you just have to focus on what's right in front of your eyes,” he continued, checking his watch. “Follow the evidence, rather than coming up with some grand idea and then trying to work back from there. Otherwise you'll end up desperately trying to support some crazy notion, and...” He paused for a moment. “Well, trust me, that way lies failure at best and humiliation at worst. It's better if you learn that lesson now, rather than later.”

“I'll get the rewrite to you first thing on Monday morning,” she told him. “I promise. And I'll do exactly what you said, I'll stick to the stuff in the textbook.”

***

“Crap,” he muttered a few minutes later, once he'd managed to get Rachel out of his office. His hands were shaking slightly as he took the hip flask from his desk drawer and filled a dirty shot glass with a half-measure of whiskey.

Loading up her email client, he glanced at the usual list of faculty messages and conference invitations, before clicking to check his junk folder.

As soon as he saw the name Emily Stone, he froze.

The email's subject line read: Please help.

“You've got to be kidding,” he muttered, clicking on the message. Grabbing his glasses, he leaned a little closer to the screen and read the message:

Dear Doctor Slocombe,

I don't know how well you remember me, but twenty-four years ago you investigated an alleged haunting involving my mother and me. I hope you don't mind me getting in touch now, but I need your help. I hope you're well, and I hope you'll at least read this message.

“Huh,” he said with a faint, astonished smile, “you hope I'm well, do you?” Grabbing the shot glass, he downed the whiskey in one go before filling it again as he read the rest of the email:

I know that what my mother and I did was wrong, and I know you have every reason to hate me. The problem is that although we lied, there was an element of truth in what we claimed. The very first experiences with the entity in our house were real, and it was only later that my mother got the idea to add some lies to the mix in an attempt to get the media involved. The whole thing spiraled out of control, but you have to believe me when I tell you that at the very beginning, something really was in my room.

For the past twenty-four years, I've been trying to put the whole thing behind me. I have a daughter of my own now, her name is Lizzie and she's twelve. In the past few weeks, she's started claiming that something is in her bedroom, which is the same room I had when I was younger. She's never been told about what happened to me, but some of the things she's saying are very similar to things that happened twenty-four years ago. I know it sounds unlikely, but I'm worried that it's all starting up again.

I'm contacting you today because I don't know where else to turn. I'm hoping that you can help, or that you can get me in touch with someone else who's willing to at least consider the possibility that this is happening. I know my history makes it almost impossible for you to believe me, but I'm worried about my daughter and I hope you can set aside your feelings about me, and see if there's anything you can do to help Lizzie.

I hope you're well, and that you'll feel able to help in some way.

Yours sincerely,

Emily Stone.

“Yours sincerely?” he muttered, pouring another shot of whiskey and downing it immediately, before pouring yet another. “Who the hell writes that in an email?”

Clicking the 'reply' link, he took a deep breath and tried to work out how to respond. For a moment, he considered deleting the message and forgetting all about it, but he felt a little annoyed that Emily Stone had contacted him again after all these years, and he was determined to make her understand just how he felt about her. Finally, he began to type.

Dear Emily Stone,

Fuck off.

Yours sincerely,

Doctor Robert Slocombe

Taking a deep breath, he clicked 'send', before leaning back and staring at the screen for a moment.

“What the hell,” he whispered to himself finally, “is wrong with that woman?”

***

“No!” he shouted, leaning across the table and almost knocking over several drinks. “That's the best part! She actually said she needed my help! Can you believe her gall?”

Smiling, Douglas took a sip of his beer.

“I mean,” Robert continued, “the dumb bitch -”

“Hey!” Jenna said, nudging his arm. “Cut that out!”

“You know what I mean,” he continued. “The nerve of the woman!”

“Calm down, Rob,” Jenna said, putting a hand on his shoulder and gently easing him back into his seat. “Come on, there's no need to get quite so agitated just 'cause you've had a few pints. And let's not go calling people dumb bitches. You never used to use words like that. Don't be that kind of person.”

“But can you believe her audacity?” he asked, looking around at the others in their corner booth, tucked back from the crowded bar. “After almost a quarter of a century, she drags herself back to me with her begging bowl, thinking I'm stupid enough to fall for the same bullshit twice. I'll forward you a copy of her message, it's pathetic and insane and whiny all at the same time. I can just imagine her typing it out, getting ready to spin another little web and catch me all over again. She obviously takes after her mother.”

“What exactly did she say?” Jenna asked.

“Just that she wanted my help.”

“And then what?”

“Some bullshit about her daughter, and about how part of the original story was true.”

“And you didn't reply?”

“I told her politely to leave me alone,” he said firmly. “Why would I waste my time listening to a liar?”

“You could have at least heard her out,” Jenna replied. “What harm would it have done? Maybe she really needs help.”

“She needs help, alright,” he muttered. “She needs locking up in a padded cell. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of a mother she must be.”

“It'd make a hell of a book, though,” Douglas pointed out.

“On what?” Robert asked. “Gullible fools? Compulsive liars?”

“On the human condition,” he continued. “Something's obviously not right in this Emily Stone woman's head. No-one rational would come back to you like this, not after everything that happened last time. Either she's genuinely got a screw loose or -”

Robert waited for him to finish. “Or what?”

“Or nothing. Sorry, I don't know where I was going with that.” He took another sip. “I mean, barring the possibility that there might have been a shred of truth in her story. If I recall correctly, that was an idea that was floating around once.”

“Hah!” Robert replied, taking a swig of beer before sitting back and letting out a loud burp.

“It might be good for you to have a project,” Jenna suggested, putting a hand on Robert's arm. “It's been a while since you really had something to get your teeth into, something to -” Reaching out, she steadied his pint glass as he almost knocked it over while fumbling for a lighter. “Something to keep your mind occupied,” she continued, with a hint of desperation in her voice. “Remember in the old days, when you actually gave a shit about your work?”

“You mean, when I believed in all that paranormal crap?”

“At least you believed in something.”

“I was desperate to believe,” he replied, before glancing over at Douglas. “And you're still chugging away at it, aren't you? Tell me, Doug, how goes life in the paranormal research whatever-it-is business these days?”

“Under-funded and under-appreciated,” Douglas muttered. “Be glad you got out when you did.”

“I'm thankful every day,” Robert replied. “Every morning, I wake up and feel a wave of relief when I remember that I don't still pursue that kind of garbage.”

“You don't know it's garbage,” Jenna pointed out. “You need to at least -”

Feeling a buzzing sensation in her pocket, she pulled out her phone.

“Go on,” Robert muttered, “answer it. I'm sure your dear husband wants to know when you're getting home. Give him my regards, by the way. What's his name again? Tim? Tom? Ted?”

As a scowling Jenna squeezed past the others and made her way to the crowded pub's front door, Robert stared down at his drink for a moment, before noticing that Douglas was watching him.

“What?” he asked.

“Rob, I know what Emily Stone and her mother did, and I know how it affected you and what it did to your career.” He paused. “But from a sociological standpoint, she'd be a fascinating case study in... I don't know, in whatever the hell is going through her head.”

“Bullshit,” Robert replied, taking another swig of beer, and this time managing to spill some down his front. “It's all bullshit, and I don't want anything to do with any of it. If that idiot wants to keep spewing rubbish about ghosts, let her. I just hope she doesn't screw her daughter's life up.”

***

“Jesus!” Tripping over something in the dark, Robert tried to steady himself but failed. Instead, he crashed down onto the floor of his cramped apartment, letting out a gasp of pain in the process.

Getting to his feet, he kicked the door shut before stumbling to the kitchen and flicking the light-switch. Barely able to stand, he stood in the doorway for a moment, swaying as he fumbled for his phone, which he tapped a couple of times before waiting for the call to connect.

“Come on,” he muttered, drumming his fingers against the door-frame as he glanced at the clock on the wall.

2:15am.

“Hi,” said a voice on the phone finally, sounding bright and cheerful, “this is Doctor Jenna Riseborough. I can't answer your call right now, but please leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.”

Followed by a beep.

Robert frowned.

“It's me,” he muttered, slurring his speech. “I just though I'd call and make sure you got home safely. That's the gentlemanly thing to do, isn't it? To make sure you got home to the sweet embrace of your loving -”

He hiccuped.

“Your loving -”

And again.

“You know what I mean. And fuck Emily Stone, by the way. Fuck her and her stupid ghost games and all that bullshit. I hope there is a ghost in her house, making her life a nightmare. If anyone deserves such a fate, it's that...”

He paused, trying to think of the right word, before there was another beep and he realized he'd run out of time to leave a message. Staring at his phone, he considered calling back and leaving another, before tossing the phone onto the counter and heading to the chair in the corner. Slumping down, he closed his eyes and decided to just rest for a minute or two before finding his way to bed. He took a deep breath and leaned back, and within just a few seconds he was fast asleep.

Chapter Sixteen

Twenty-four years ago

“My name is Doctor Robert Slocombe,” he replied with a smile, reaching out to shake her hand. “I'm a researcher who focuses on -”

“Doctor?” Joyce replied with a frown. “You're a bit young to be a doctor, aren't you?”

“Well, I -”

“And handsome, too,” she added, taking a drag from her cigarette while keeping her eyes fixed on him. “I thought doctors were all stuffy old men in tweed suits? What particular part of a woman are you most qualified to examine, Doctor Slocombe?”

“There are lots of different types of doctors,” he replied, as he twisted his hand a little to get it free from her grip. “I happen to specialize in sociological anthropology, and I take a particular interest in paranormal activity. As I explained on the phone, I'm part of an informal group based at Westerson University, and we undertake studies into claims of supernatural activity. Ghosts, spirits, that sort of thing.”

“Huh.” She eyed him for a moment longer, before stepping back so he could enter the house. “And you reckon can help us, can you? 'Cause the people from the papers, they said we need proper evidence of what's going on. We've gotta kick it up a gear.”

“That's why I'm here,” he replied, stepping into the hallway and immediately noticing the strong smell of stale frying oil, mixed with cigarette smoke. The white-and-pink wallpaper was stained light brown in places, and there was no bulb in the light hanging from the ceiling. “I read your story in the Herald,” he continued, “and I really think it's worthy of further investigation.”

“What's in that briefcase?” she asked, pushing the door shut and then turning to him.

“Just a few items that I like to bring during my first visits.”

“So you've done stuff like this before?”

He nodded. “One of my main tasks for the group involves reaching out to potential new cases. Obviously the vast majority don't merit further investigation, but -”

Hearing footsteps nearby, he turned and saw a little girl arriving at the top of the stairs, looking down at him with a faint frown.

“You must be Emily,” he said, forcing a smile.

“Emily, get your arse down here,” Joyce said, waving at her daughter to join them. “Come on, don't be shy. This handsome young doctor has come to talk to us about what's been going on in your bedroom.” She nudged Robert's arm. “Spend a lot of time in strange bedrooms, do you?”

“I just want to talk to you,” he continued, focusing on Emily and trying to ignore her mother. “I read about your story, and -”

“It's our story,” Joyce said suddenly, “not just hers. We're going through this together. Isn't that right, Emily?”

The little girl nodded, although she seemed strangely reluctant.

“Come on, then!” Joyce shouted, heading through to the living room. “There's no point fannying about, is there? You want a drink of something, doctor? I've got some beer in the fridge.”

“Not for me, thanks,” he told her. “Just tea would be fine, if you have that, but there's really no -”

“Milk and sugar?”

“Just milk.”

“Sweet enough already, are you?”

Forcing a smile as Joyce headed to the kitchen, Robert turned to look back up at Emily. Having never really been around children before, he felt extremely awkward, and he wasn't sure quite to what extent he needed to dumb down his words for the girl.

“There's really nothing to be afraid of,” he said after a moment. “I'm just here to help. You... I suppose you must be quite scared of everything that's happened.”

Emily stared at him for a moment, as if she was having to concentrate hard, and finally she nodded.

“It's all science,” he added. “That's why I'm here. If these things are really happening to you, that means it's something tangible, something we can analyze and measure, and eventually explain. Don't you think that if we can do all of that, it won't be so scary anymore?”

She nodded again.

“And don't worry, there are no probes or injections. We'll start by talking, that's all, and then we'll come up with a plan from there. I have a trichtometer and some infra-red cameras, but we don't need to use those today, not if they scare you. I want to hear your version of the story, from your own mouth, without it being filtered through all the journalists who've been writing about it. Do you think you'd be willing to just sit down and talk to me, face to face?”

Slowly, and still a little cautiously, Emily began to make her way downstairs.

***

“Oh, it was awful!” Joyce shrieked, waving her hands in the air. “Like this, you know?”

Robert stared at her, trying to work out exactly what she meant as she waved her hands around. “Um -”

“Things were flying through the air,” she continued, wide-eyed with shock. “It was like magic. It's like this ghost can break the laws of nature!”

“I'm not sure that's quite true,” Robert replied, making another note on his pad. He glanced at Emily, who had been sitting quietly during her mother's long account of recent events. “Whatever's happening here, it's part of the world around us, so we can find a scientific -”

“It's not normal,” Joyce said firmly, as she lit another cigarette. “It's like a spirit from the world of the dead, breaking back through to terrorize us!” She slid some of the photos across the table. “Take a look at those if you don't believe us. The papers didn't print them all.”

“These are certainly -” Spotting an image that seemed to show Emily screaming as she was thrown through the air, he paused for a moment. There were no obvious wires, and the little girl's body seemed unnaturally arranged, as if some huge force was pushing on her torso, and he found it hard to believe that twelve-year-old could fake an expression of such absolute terror. “They're very striking,” he added finally. “I've seen photos from other cases, but never anything like this.”

“Have you ever met someone else who's had this happen to them?” Emily asked timidly.

“I've investigated a few cases,” he replied, “but they all turned out to be -” He paused, aware that he needed to be diplomatic. “Well, they -”

“Fakes?” Joyce asked. “Hoaxes? There's nothing fake about this, so don't you even start wondering, alright?” She grabbed another photo from the pile and thrust it into his hands. “Does that look fake to you?”

Looking down at the image, he saw that it showed Emily's face in close-up, with tears streaming down her cheeks. There was a bruise just to one side of her eye, too, but when he turned to look at her now, he saw that the bruise was gone. Still, there was a trace of fear in the girl's expression, and he found it hard to believe that anyone – let alone a twelve-year-old girl – could fake such stark emotion.

“Emily,” he said after a moment, “have you ever suffered any injuries as a result of what's going on in this house?”

She opened her mouth to reply.

“She's had lots of bruises,” Joyce interjected. “One cut, on her left arm, but it's healed now. That was when she banged herself against the wardrobe and there was a nail sticking out. Apart from that, nothing major.”

“And you haven't thought about just moving out?” he asked, turning to her. “I understand these events have been building since the first incident in September, and yet you're both still here?”

“Where are we supposed to go?” Joyce replied. “We can't just buy another house, you know. And this area... People aren't exactly begging to buy a place round here. My parents got it on Right to Buy.” She tapped her cigarette on the side of the ashtray. “Of course, when the money comes in from the papers, that's when we'll be able to afford a new place. That's one of the reasons we wanted you to come and see us. We need more evidence if we're gonna get a better deal from one of the big London papers. We need someone like you to say that this is real, so...”

Grabbing one of the photos, she placed it in front of him.

“If you could just do that,” she continued, “we can all be on our way.”

“I need to thoroughly investigate first,” he told her.

“Yeah, but... Do you really?”

“Our first concern needs to be Emily's safety,” he pointed out. “If she -”

“Obviously,” she replied, a little dismissively, “but after that, we need a good deal. We've got a real ghost in this house and sure, it's awful and all that, but we might as well make a decent -”

Before she could finish, there was a loud bump from one of the rooms upstairs.

Looking up at the ceiling, Robert paused for a moment, before turning to see that Joyce was watching him, almost as if she was waiting to see his reaction. He glanced over at Emily, who was now looking down at the table with a frown, as if the sudden noise had worried her.

“You wanna come upstairs and take a look?” Joyce asked. “I should warn you. I can't guarantee your safety.”

***

“Looks just like a normal little girl's room, doesn't it?” she said a few minutes later, leaning on the door-frame and watching as Robert made his way across to the window. “All the usual shit they want. Toys, books, dolls, clothes.” She sniffed. “See those yellow socks over there? Got ten pairs for a pound. Good deal, eh?”

Turning to them, Robert saw that Emily was holding back behind her mother, as if she was scared of entering the room.

“And all the activity in the house is focused on this room?” he asked.

Joyce nodded.

“Have there been any manifestations anywhere else in the house?”

“We hear stuff from other rooms,” she replied, “but no, most of it seems to be in here. It's usually when Emily's alone.”

“What's a manifestation?” Emily whispered.

“It's the ghost, dummy,” Joyce snapped at her.

“And how do you feel about all of this?” he asked, smiling at Emily. “Do you like being in your bedroom by yourself, or does it scare you?” He waited for a reply, but after a moment Emily simply stepped behind her mother, so he could no longer see her.

“She's shy,” Joyce said, rolling her eyes as she took another drag on her cigarette. “So what do you think, Doctor Slocombe? Can you help us? Are you ready to tell the papers that all the ghost stuff's real?”

“I definitely want to look into this case some more,” he replied, “and I'd like to start, if you don't mind, by talking to Emily alone for a few minutes.”

“Alone?” The suggestion seemed to concern Joyce a little. “What do you want to talk to her alone for?”

“It's standard procedure in these investigations. I want to hear the story in her own words, and I need to exclude the possibility of outside influences.”

“Are you accusing me of -”

“Absolutely not,” he replied, “never, not for one moment. I just need to hear Emily tell me what happened, just her and me. Do you think that's possible?”

***

“Tell me about the figure in this photo,” he said, as he and Emily sat alone at the kitchen table. “Is this the figure you saw in your room?”

Emily stared at the image, which showed a faint, blurry shape by the door in her bedroom. It wasn't possible to make out too many features, but the shape was clearly a figure, and dark shadows could just about be discerned on the face, where the eyes and mouth should be. After a moment, she looked down at the sticker on her wrist, which was attached to a couple of wires.

“I told you,” he continued, “that's just to measure your heart-rate. It's nothing to worry about.” Reaching over, he turned a dial on the machine, and for a moment her heart-beat could be heard.

“Is that mine?” she asked.

He nodded.

She stared open-mouthed, until he turned the dial back down.

“So you see,” he continued, “there's really nothing to be scared about. That's one of the reasons I like to study things. Once you study them and understand them, they're not scary.”

She sniffed, before looking back at the photo.

“How many times have you seen it?” he asked, still trying to get the little girl to open up. “It's quite blurry in this picture, isn't it? Have you seen it more clearly?”

“It's a her,” Emily whispered finally.

“It is?”

She nodded.

“And how do you know that?” Looking at the monitor next to his pencil and paper, he saw that Emily's heart-rate had briefly spiked before going back down.

“I've seen her face.”

“What does she look like?”

“She's...” Emily paused for a moment. “She's pretty. She's got long black hair, but she never smiles. She always seems tired.”

“And when do you see her?”

“In the dark.”

“In your room?”

She nodded.

“How does she appear?”

“You -” Again, Emily paused. “You know when your door's shut and you can see light on the edges, from out on the landing?”

“I do.”

“Some nights,” she continued, “I see something moving in front of the door, blocking out the light for a moment.”

“And that's how you know it's one of the nights she's going to appear?”

She nodded.

“And then what happens?”

“And then...” Another pause, as she stared straight ahead. “And then I start to see her face in the darkness. She usually starts on the other side of the room and slowly comes over to the bed.”

“She's looking at you?”

She nodded. Again, her heart-rate spike briefly, and this time she winced a little, as if she was in pain.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded.

“What does she do when she reaches the bed?”

“She looks at me.”

“Just that?”

“She looks down at me.”

“And do you hide your head under the covers?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Because I want to see what she's doing.”

“That's very sensible. It's a bit like what I'm doing with all these machines and questions.”

“And then she starts knocking things over. That's when Mum hears, usually, and she comes through.”

“You don't call out for her first?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“I'm too scared.”

“And when your mother comes in, she sometimes has a camera?”

“And there's a big flash,” Emily replied, “when she takes a photo.”

“But in some of these photos,” he continued, holding up an image of Emily being thrown through the air, “you're not in bed.”

She frowned, staring at the image.

“So does the lady pull you out of bed and do this?”

Emily paused for a moment, before slowly nodding.

“So she's angry?”

“Mum says she must want something, but we don't know what.”

“That's a possibility,” he replied. “So the -”

“Are you really an expert on ghosts?”

“Well... I've certainly studied them a lot.”

She paused, as if she wanted to ask something else but was a little scared. “Can we talk about the first time?” she said finally, with tears in her eyes.

“The first time you saw the woman?”

She nodded, and for a moment she seemed to be grimacing with pain, as if something was really hurting her.

“Okay. Why do you want to talk about the first time?”

“Because that was the only -” She paused again, as if she'd caught herself just in time. A tear began to run down her cheek, but she quickly wiped it away.

“Was the first time the scariest?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Tell me about it.”

She glanced over at the door to the kitchen, as if she was worried about her mother overhearing. “I'm not supposed to talk about the first time,” she whispered finally. “Mum told me to talk about the other times.”

“Well, that's okay,” he continued. “You can talk to me about anything you want. If you want to start with the first time, then we'll do that.” He waited, but she seemed much more scared than before, even as she turned back to look at him. “You're completely safe,” he said after a moment. “Nothing's going to happen to you, Emily. I just need to know what happened, so that I can think about ways we can maybe stop it happening in future. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

“I was in bed,” she continued, “and I heard something moving nearby.”

“Like footsteps?”

“A bit. And then I...” She stared down at the table for a moment, as if she was reliving the whole thing. “I looked over at the window, and I could see a shape in front of it, walking across the room.”

“Coming closer to the bed?”

She shook her head.

“Just... walking across?”

She nodded. “And then it stopped, like it was thinking. And then it turned to me.”

“Could you see its face?”

“Just the outline.”

Looking down at her hands, he saw that for the first time during their interview her fingers were trembling. Glancing at the monitor, he realized that this time her heart-rate was rising and rising, getting higher instead of spiking. For some reason, talking about the first night seemed to upset her a lot more.

“What happened next?” he asked, turning back to her.

“She walked out of the way,” she replied, her voice tense with fear now, “and I couldn't see her anymore.”

“But she was still there?”

She nodded.

“How could you tell?”

“I just could. I could hear her.”

“And the other times you saw her, she was always more direct?” He waited for a reply. “You want to talk about the first time some more, don't you?”

She nodded.

“So did you see her again on that first night?”

She paused, before nodding again.

“When?”

“She got onto my bed.”

“Onto the bed?” He made a note on his pad. “I don't remember reading that in the newspaper reports.”

“She got on at the bottom,” Emily replied, with more tears in her eyes, “and then she slowly started crawling up.”

“Why didn't you call for your mother?”

“I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know, I just couldn't. I couldn't move.” She paused. “She crawled all the way up to me. It took a long time, she moved slowly. I could feel her hands on me, it was like...” Her bottom lip was trembling now, as if the memory was too horrific. “I could feel her skin,” she whimpered finally, “it was torn, like pieces were falling off. And then she put a hand on the side of my face and forced me to turn my head to one side and -”

He waited for her to continue. “And what?” he asked eventually.

“Her voice...”

“This was the first time you heard her voice?” Again, he waited for her to say something, but she seemed almost too horrified to go on. Glancing at the monitor, he was that her heart-rate was soaring, and he knew he should stop the interview but at the same time he felt he had to go on, just a little further.

“She asked my name,” Emily whispered suddenly.

“Did you tell her?”

She nodded.

“And then what?”

“She told me about the...” Another pause, as if the idea was too shocking. “She told me about the dead place, where she and the others...”

He waited for her to continue. “What dead place?” he asked finally. “What others?”

***

Today

“The place where she'd come from,” Emily's voice explained, sounding a little crackly on the twenty-four-year-old tape recording. “She said she was from a place where the walls were made out of the inside of people's souls, and she and the other dead people could look out through those souls. She said they could come out sometimes too, but that what they really wanted was to break through forever.”

The tape hissed and bumped a little for a moment.

“Did she give this dead place a name?” Robert heard his own voice asking.

“Just the dead place. She said she was trying to find a soul she could break out from. She said...”

Taking a drag on his cigar, Robert waited for the tape to continue.

“She said she thought maybe she could come through me,” the little girl's voice said finally. “She told me that of all the souls she'd found, I was the most...”

There was a pause.

“The most what?” his voice asked.

“Willing,” Emily replied. “I don't know what that means.”

Even today, twenty-four years later, he remembered the look on Emily's face as she told him about the dead place, and about the first time she'd encountered the presence in her room. After the whole haunting experience had been debunked, it was this recording that he kept coming back to, because it was this recording and only this recording that still struck him as perhaps having a shred of truth.

Picking up the faded print-out from all those years ago, he saw the read-out from the heart monitor, showing how Emily's pulse had risen dramatically while she'd been talking about the dead place.

“So does she talk about the dead place every time?” he heard himself asking.

Silence for a moment. He remembered her shaking her head.

“Just the first time?”

“Mum says I'm not supposed to talk to you about the first time,” Emily whispered, her voice barely getting picked up by the tape. “She wants me to talk to you about the other times, the times in the photos.”

“Why is that?”

“I don't know. I think maybe she's scared.”

“Of the dead place?”

“She won't let me talk about it. Not even to her.”

“But she'll talk to you about everything else?”

“She...” Another pause. “She says...”

Suddenly he heard the sound of a door being opened, and he remembered the way Joyce had stormed in, having evidently overheard the conversation.

“Well, then,” she said, clearly trying to change the tempo of the encounter, “how are we all -”

Switching the recording off, Robert leaned back in his chair. The last thing he wanted was to listen to the sound of Joyce's voice, and he knew that everything Emily had told him with her mother in the room had just been part of the hoax. Still, as he scrolled the recording back to the beginning, he realized he couldn't quite get the nagging sense of doubt from his mind. Even though he knew he was just torturing himself, he began to play the whole thing again.

“Tell me about the figure in this photo,” he heard himself saying on the tape. “Is this the figure you saw in your room?”

Chapter Seventeen

“Mummy,” Lizzie said, standing in the doorway, “I'm tired. Can we go to bed now?”

“Sure, sweetie, I just...” Emily paused as she read the email again. It was short and to-the-point, and finally she sighed as she closed the laptop. Clearly Doctor Robert Slocombe wasn't going to be any help.

“You look sad,” Lizzie told her.

“Me?” She turned to her daughter for a moment, before forcing a smile. “I'm not sad, sweetie. I'm just... You're right. It's bedtime.”

***

They were screaming all around her, reaching up from the darkness and pulling on her body as she tried to climb up to freedom.

Every time she managed to get free of one grip, two more took hold. Their arms swarmed around her, and their hands – frayed and rotten, with pieces of loose flesh hanging down – clawed at her flesh. She reached up and tried to grab hold of something, anything, she could use to pull herself up the gray wall that seemed to have been stitched together from scraps of human flesh. Finally, one of her hands found the inside of a woman's face, and she was able to slip her fingers through the vacant eyes. With every last ounce of strength in her body, she hauled herself above the crowd of figures massing in the darkness, but her brief escape only caused the figures below to howl louder than ever with frustration.

Looking over her shoulder for a moment, she saw them snarling up at her. She glanced toward the horizon and saw a vast sea of figures surging toward her. The air seemed to almost shudder with their cries.

Reaching up again, she slipped the fingers of her left hand into a mouth and then pulled herself up a little further. Her feet scrambled for purchase, eventually slipping into two more mouths and allowing her to climb higher still. With tears in her eyes, she looked over her shoulder again and saw that there were now thousands of dark figures reaching up to her, while in the distance she could see the sphere's other wall, with glints of light bursting through from various mouths and eyes.

Turning, she was about to climb up a little further when she realized she could see movement through one of the eye-holes in the wall of flesh right in front of her. Leaning closer, she spotted a figure walking across a dull, gray kitchen, and she heard echoing voices in the distance, their tones sounding slow and drawn out, as if -

Suddenly she felt a hand grabbing her ankle, its fingernails slicing into her flesh, and she looked down to see that the dark figures had begun to climb after her. She tried to shake the hand loose, before reaching up and trying to climb again. A moment later, another hand grabbed her leg, and she felt herself being dragged back down. She held onto the wall, with the fingers of her left hand poking through a pair of eye-holes, but the flesh began to tear as she was pulled further and further down, and as more hands took hold of her, claiming her, dragging her screaming into the sea of darkness.

They'd won. After so many years, they'd finally got her.

“Lizzie!” she shouted, sitting up in bed suddenly. Sweat was pouring down her body and her heart was racing, and for a moment, in the dark bedroom, she could still feel those hands touching her. Looking down at her arms and chest, she instinctively started to search for cuts or bruises, but there were none. After a moment, she managed to start pushing the dream away, only to suddenly realize that she wasn't alone. There was a small figure standing in the dark doorway that led out to the landing.

She paused for a moment.

“Lizzie?”

She waited, but now that she was certain her daughter was watching her, she felt a shiver pass through her body. The sweat caking her body suddenly felt cold, and as she leaned forward she realized that something seemed very wrong. Lizzie often ran through to her room in the night when something had scared her, but she'd never before stood in the doorway like this, just staring, silhouetted against the landing's dull light.

“Lizzie?” she said again. “Are you okay? Do you want to come in with me?”

She waited again.

No reply.

“Did I scare you?” she asked, sitting up on the bed, which creaked a little under her weight. “I was just having a bad dream, that's all. Even mummies sometimes get those.”

Lifting the edge of the duvet, she waited for Lizzie to hurry over and dive in.

“Sweetie?”

After a moment, she reached over and felt for the bedside light. It took a few seconds, but she managed to find the switch, and then she turned back to Lizzie, who had taken a few steps closer.

“What is it?” Emily asked. “Did something happen in your room again?”

Lizzie stared at her for a moment, with a strangely blank expression, before slowly a faint smile began to spread across her face.

“Lizzie?”

She waited, and she told herself she was imagining things, that her daughter was just playing a prank.

“Lizzie, sweetie, I...”

Her voice trailed off as she saw that Lizzie's smile had grown, while the little girl's stare was fixed on her with unblinking intensity. After a moment, Emily leaned to one side, hoping to get a better view of Lizzie's eyes, which seemed almost completely black.

“Lizzie -”

“I know your name,” Lizzie said suddenly, her voice sounding slightly deeper than usual. “I've seen you before.”

“I...” She paused. “No, sweetheart, you -”

“Your name is Emily.”

She froze for a moment, staring at her daughter and waiting for her to blink, waiting to see a hint of white in the two dark pools of blackness that stared back at her.

“How was your dream?” Lizzie asked.

“My dream?”

“You were calling out.”

“I told you, it was just a nightmare.”

“Did you enjoy it? Did you like seeing the dark place?”

“I...” She paused again, feeling a shiver pass through her body. “Lizzie, why don't you get into bed with me and -”

“It was cold, wasn't it?” Lizzie continued. “So many screams. Do you finally understand?”

“Understand what?”

The little girl paused. “Why I have to get out of there.”

“What are you talking about?” Emily asked, crawling across the bed until she was close to the edge. “Lizzie, why are you up right now?”

“Don't call me that.”

“What -”

“It's not my name.”

“Lizzie?”

“Don't call me that!” she said again, with a hint of anger in her voice.

“I...” Pausing, she reached out to touch her daughter's face, but she held back at the last moment as she felt an unusual chill in the air, coming from Lizzie's body. She wanted to believe that she was imagining things, that maybe this was still part of the dream, but deep down she knew it was really happening. “What...”

Lizzie's grin broadened.

“Are you playing a game?” Emily asked. “Lizzie...”

“I wanted you to see,” Lizzie replied, tilting her head slightly so that her mother could see into her large, black eyes. “I wanted you to understand what it's like in the dead place, so that you realize why I have to get out.”

“No,” Emily whispered.

“No?”

“Please, stop...”

Slowly, and a little awkwardly, Lizzie took a step closer.

“What are you doing with my daughter?” Emily asked finally, with tears in her eyes. “What do you want? Leave her alone, whatever you want, take it from me! Leave her alone!”

“You know what I want,” the girl replied, “but if I can't get it from you, if you keep on resisting, maybe I'll have to get it from your daughter.”

“I'm not resisting! Leave her alone and take me! Don't -”

Before she could finish, Emily saw with horror that something seemed to be moving beneath the skin on Lizzie's face. A moment later, she saw a dark, peeling finger starting to poke out from below the little girl's left eyeball, as if a hand was trying to reach out. Within seconds, the impression of an entire hand could be seen pushing through from under Lizzie's skin, with a dark thumb poking out through the mouth.

“No!” Emily shouted. “Stop!”

“Maybe I should use her anyway,” Lizzie continued, as the hand pushed harder against the inside of her skin. “Maybe it's easier to get through her. I have to get out soon, and all that really matters is that it's someone with a link to this land. They're starting to come up after me, they're starting to catch me. Do you know how hard it was to climb this far? I'm so close and I won't let you stop me.”

“Please -”

“It's not fair!” Emily shouted suddenly, taking another step closer. Reaching up, she put her hands on her face, running her fingers against her cheekbones. “I wasn't ready! He had no right to do this to me!” After a moment, she began to dig her fingernails into her flesh, as if she was trying to pull it all away.

“Stop!” Climbing off the bed, Emily grabbed Lizzie and lifted her up, before hurrying out of the room and over to the stairs. Carefully avoiding looking at her daughter's face, she carried her down to the hallway and then out through the front door, not stopping until they reached the street. Finally, setting her down, she hugged her tight, terrified to look at her face.

She waited, shivering in the night's cold air.

“Please,” she whispered, “don't do this.”

In the distance, a siren passed close to the end of the street, rushing off to some other emergency in another part of town.

“Please,” Emily whimpered, with tears in her eyes. “Please, don't hurt my little girl.”

Trembling, she hugged Lizzie tighter.

Silence.

Finally, Emily took a deep breath and forced herself to look into Lizzie's eyes, only to see that everything seemed to have gone back to normal. There were a couple of scratches from the girl's fingernails, but the other distortions were gone.

Lizzie blinked a couple of times, before looking around with a faint frown.

“Mummy?” she asked hesitantly. “Why are we outside?”

Pulling her close for another hug, Emily looked back toward the house and saw to her horror that there was a faint figure visible in one of the upstairs windows, moving briefly to one side before disappearing from view.

“Mummy, what's wrong?” Lizzie asked, sounding as if she was about to start crying. “Mummy, I'm cold. What are you doing? You're scaring me!”

***

“Can I pay half on one card and half on the other?” Emily asked a short while later as she stood in the reception area of a local motel.

“We don't offer that option,” the woman replied. “I'm sorry.”

“Okay, then...” She looked at the two cards in her hands for a moment, desperately trying to work out which had more money on it, before slotting one into the machine. Glancing at the woman, she forced a smile, even though she knew it wouldn't be convincing. She figured she had just enough money, maybe, to get a night at the motel.

“If you'd like to type in your pin,” the woman said, “we'll see if we can get you into one of our rooms.”

As she entered her pin, Emily looked over her shoulder and saw Lizzie sitting in a chair nearby. The little girl seemed to have gone back to normal now, and she seemed more flustered and confused than scared, but Emily was certain of one thing: they had to stay out of that house.

***

“I'm not begging for anything,” she hissed a short while later, sitting on the toilet. “I just... I need a loan, Brad. She's your daughter too, and right now she can't be in that house. We need to stay in a motel, I've managed to pay for the first night but if you can just send next month's child support a week early -”

“What's going on?” he asked. “Don't give me any more bullshit, Em. What exactly are you and Lizzie doing staying in a goddamn motel two minutes from the house?”

“It's complicated.”

“Are you having another of your episodes?”

“Of course not!”

“I can't take Lizzie right now,” he continued. “It's a bad time for me.”

“I'm not asking you to take her,” she replied, “I just need next month's child support a week early.”

“I don't have it.”

“But your job -”

“I just don't have it,” he said again. “Go to the council, tell them you need money, that's what they're there for. You can't be doing that badly if you're okay to stay in a motel.”

“Please don't do this,” she whispered.

“Do what?”

“You have the money,” she snapped at him, “you just don't want to help out!”

“I don't understand what's wrong,” he replied. “You're not making any goddamn sense, Em, do you realize that? You say you had to get Lizzie out of the house, but you won't say why. You say you can't go back, but again, you won't say why. Is it...” He paused. “It's not more of that ghost bullshit, is it? For fuck's sake, Em, have you infected her with your bullshit?”

“Go to hell,” she told him. “I'll find someone else who'll help your daughter.”

As she cut the call, she heard a faint knock on the bathroom door. A moment later, Lizzie stepped into the room with a tired, worried look on her face.

“Who are you talking to?” she asked.

“No-one, sweetie.”

“Was it Daddy?”

“No.”

“Can we go to sleep now? I'm really tired, and my face hurts.”

“Your -” She paused. “Where does it hurt?”

“It's just sore all over.”

“Get into bed,” she replied. “Everything'll be okay, I promise. I've just got one more call to make, and then I'll be right with you.” Looking down at the phone, she brought up Karl's number. He was the last person she wanted to call, but she knew she needed help from someone.

“Do you promise?” Lizzie asked.

“Just go to bed. I swear, I'll be there in two minutes. You've got school in the morning, remember? You need to get some sleep.”

Slowly, and a little reluctantly, Lizzie pulled the door shut, and a moment later she could be heard climbing onto the bed.

“Please pick up,” Emily whispered, as she put the phone next to her ear. “Come on, I need you. Please, God, don't do this to us.”

“Hi,” Karl's voicemail said suddenly, “you've reached -”

Cutting the call, she set the phone next to the sink before leaning forward and putting her head in her hands. For a moment, she thought back to the dream she'd had earlier, when she'd been climbing away from the people in the dead place. It wasn't the first time she'd had that dream and she knew it wouldn't be the last, but she was more worried about whatever was happening to Lizzie. She knew they couldn't go back to the house, but at the same time she didn't have the money to go anywhere else, and she didn't have any friends who might take them in.

“Fuck,” she whispered. “Fuck, fuck -”

“Mummy!” Lizzie called through from the bedroom.

“I'll be there in a minute!”

“Mummy -”

“Just hang on! I'll be there!”

“My face hurts!”

Emily froze for a moment. “What... What did you say?” she asked finally.

“My face hurts,” Lizzie said again, as her voice became a kind of whine, threatening to break into sobs at any moment. “It really hurts.”

Heading through to the dark main room, Emily made her way to the bed and sat down before fumbling to locate a switch for the light. Finding one, she finally turned to look at Lizzie, only to see to her horror that the little girl's face was covered in several huge, thick bruises, which seemed to have developed in the spots where the hand had been pushing through an hour earlier.

“What's wrong with me?” Lizzie whimpered. “Mummy, my face really hurts!”

Chapter Eighteen

Twenty-six years ago

“I said,” he shouted, leaning closer to her ear, “this party is terrible!”

She smiled, before slipping away and making her way along the hallway.

Sighing, Robert took another sip of beer before turning to look back into the kitchen. Several people were chatting away, while a girl was sitting at the table by the window, clearly feeling sick to her stomach as she was comforted by her friend.

“You alright?” Douglas asked, bumping into him in a drunken stupor. “Come on, mate, you're not gonna hang around in the kitchen all night, are you?”

“Didn't you get the memo?” Robert replied. “The kitchen's where the cool people hang out.”

“And how would you know what the cool people do?” Stumbling to the fridge, he pulled it open and grabbed another beer before heading back to the door. “I think I've got a chance with that Felicity girl from the anthropology department. Be right back, my man. I'm going to try to lure her in by telling her about the new project we're working on. Girls love ghosts, right?”

Smiling, Robert turned and watched as his friend stumbled back toward the flat's main room. A moment later, he almost dropped his beer as something bumped into his shoulder, and he turned to find that the drunk girl from the table was hurrying past, making her way to the bathroom with her friend in tow.

“Hannah!” the less-drunk girl shouted after her friend. “For God's sake -”

Before she could catch up, the drunk girl – Hannah, apparently – had slammed the bathroom door shut.

“Hannah!” the other girl called out to her, trying the handle unsuccessfully. “Can you open up? You need someone to hold your hair back while you throw up!”

After a moment, the girl stood back, clearly exasperated, before making her way back to the kitchen. As she got closer to the door, she glanced at Robert.

“Rough night?” he asked.

She smiled, although she was clearly frustrated.

“I think I've seen you around,” Robert continued, switching his beer to his left hand and holding his right out for her to shake. “You work at the university, don't you?”

“I...” She paused, before shaking his hand. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I didn't think I was that noticeable.”

“Rob Slocombe,” he told her. “I work in the -”

“Are you one of the guys setting up that group to investigate paranormal activity?” she asked, suddenly seeming far more interested.

“God,” he replied, “are people talking about us already?”

“Jenna,” she told him. “Jenna Riseborough. I'd really love to talk to you about what you're doing some time. In fact, I was planning to come and look you up.”

“Well, here I am!”

Six hours later, as the sun came up and the party finally started to fade, they were still at the kitchen table, still talking about the work Robert was undertaking, and already making plans to meet again so that Jenna could get involved. Finally, they headed off to find breakfast somewhere, still locked in conversation.

***

Today

“I just wanted to catch you in your non-hungover, non-drunk state,” Jenna explained with a faint, sad smile as they made their way along the path that led to the faculty building. “Which is basically between two and five each afternoon.”

“Come on,” Robert replied, “I'm not that bad.”

“Oh, you are,” she continued. “Seriously, Rob, you're that bad, everyone -” She caught herself just in time.

“Everyone's saying it?” he asked.

“I didn't say that.”

“Great, so I'm the campus drunk now. Don't people have anything else to talk about? I mean, sure, I like a drink now and then, but so what?”

“To drown out the sense of a fading, unfulfilled career?”

“Ouch.”

“Working on any new papers? Any projects? Dare I ask, even a book?”

“I'm mulling over a few ideas.”

“I thought so. Bugger all. What about your private life? Any women on the go?”

“I keep busy,” he told her, bristling slightly at the suggestion. “We can't all be shooting academic papers out of our -” Hearing howls of laughter nearby, he turned and saw a group of female students running out of one of the nearby buildings. “Do they have to be so loud?”

“I know!” Jenna replied sarcastically. “You should totally tell those goddamn kids to get off your lawn!”

“So now you think I'm a grumpy old man?”

“You love that persona. You embrace it with gusto.”

“I am fifty-four.”

“I'm fifty-two,” she replied. “Hell, Tom's fifty-five, and he's taking me skiing next month in Switzerland. I'm not telling you that to brag, Rob, I just thought I should remind you that there are other options. You don't have to sink into an irascible decline just yet.”

“Thanks for the advice, Jane bloody Fonda,” he muttered. Spotting a police car up ahead, parked by the faculty building's main entrance, he frowned. “What do you think they want?”

“Could be anything,” she replied. “Maybe someone in your department has been naughty? You don't have a secret weed factory hidden somewhere, do you?”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“Pity,” she added with a faint sigh. “It might do you some good.”

***

“She gave you my name?”

“She said you might be able to shed some light on what's been happening,” Detective Carver replied, with a tone of voice that made plain his extreme doubts. An unshaven man in a crumpled suit, he had the doughy complexion of an alcoholic. Taking a book from the shelf, he took a look at the title before setting it back down as if he had no idea what to do with it. “She said you're the only person who might understand. She kept saying your name over and over, so I figured it was worth a shot. Bloody hell, you've got a lot of books in this office. How many are there? A thousand?”

“At least. But hang on, has Emily Stone actually been arrested?”

“She was picked up at approximately six o'clock this morning,” Carver continued, “on suspicion of causing serious bodily harm to a child.” He looked up at the top of one of the bookcases for a moment, before turning to him. “I know, right? Sick.”

“What happened?”

“A receptionist at a motel in Coltreath called us with her concerns. She noticed that Ms. Stone's daughter had significant bruising on her face when the pair of them were leaving the building. The receptionist stated to us that the child had no signs of bruising when they'd checked in a few hours earlier. When uniform arrived, they found Ms. Stone and her daughter in a nearby alley, eating sandwiches purchased from a shop around the corner. Seems like Emily didn't want people seeing her daughter's face for some reason. The report stated that Emily seemed to be in a distressed state, and that her daughter was crying.”

“So you think Emily beat her daughter?”

“We're keeping an open mind, but for now Elizabeth Stone has been taken into protective care and Emily Stone is being held at the local station. Given the circumstances, as well as Emily's refusal to explain the bruises, plus previous reports that have been made by teachers at Elizabeth's school, we have no option but to act. When a child is in danger, that child's welfare has to be our primary consideration.” He sighed. “There are forms about this kind of thing. Lots and lots of forms.”

“So she hasn't admitted it?”

“She's barely said anything at all. Not even to the duty lawyer we got for her.”

“She just told you to come and speak to me?”

Carver nodded.

“Do you...” Robert paused for a moment. “Do you know about Emily's past?”

“Course. Who doesn't? It was all that ghost bollocks, wasn't it?” He sniffed derisively. “And you're the guy she and her mother were trying to con, yeah? No offense, but everyone in town kind of knows Emily's story, she's like the local celeb. Apparently they tried to get her on Big Brother a few years ago, but she turned them down. Dunno why, would've been fun.”

“Listen,” Robert replied, trying not to seem too dismissive, “I haven't had anything to do with Emily Stone for more than twenty-four years. She emailed me yesterday, but that was nothing, just part of whatever mania she's going through.”

“You heard from her, Sir?”

“Just a quick message.”

“And what did she want?”

“She said something about it all starting up again, but I'm not interested. It's just bullshit.”

“The ghost stuff?” Carver asked, with a barely-concealed smile.

“The ghost stuff.”

“Which she and her mother admitted, twenty-four years ago, was all a hoax?”

He nodded.

“And now,” Carver continued, “she's, what, changed her mind and decided to pretend it was real again?”

“She seems to be claiming that part of it was real all along,” he replied. “I guess she's going through some significant mental gymnastics to avoid facing the truth.”

“What was your impression of her state of mind when you read the email?”

“I'll get a copy for you,” Robert replied. “She seemed fairly rational. She wasn't a gibbering lunatic or anything like that, but it was hard to really get much of an impression. Obviously, the fact she was getting in touch with me showed that something isn't right in her head.”

“But the things she said in the email...”

“I wasn't interested in getting involved in a long discussion,” he replied, opening his laptop and bringing up the email. “I've moved on from that sort of thing, I don't have anything to do with paranormal investigations these days, and even if I did... I mean, there's just no way I could take her seriously, so I politely but firmly turned her away. She certainly didn't say anything that made me think she could be a danger to others, or I would've done something about it.”

“I've got to be honest with you, Sir, we're considering sectioning her under the Mental Health Act. If we do that, and assuming she doesn't submit to the process voluntarily, it might be useful to have your testimony on her state of mind.”

He clicked to print the message. “I couldn't really say anything useful.”

“But from your perspective, she seemed to have suddenly come out of the woodwork, as it were, and started talking about things that go bump in the night? After twenty-four years, that seems somewhat significant.”

“Yes, but -” Heading over to the printer, he waited as the message came out, and then he took it over to Carver. “The girl, Emily's daughter... What exactly is the nature of her injuries?”

“Bruises on the face, mainly.” He took a look at the printout.

“Consistent with having been beaten?”

“We're not sure yet. She won't say anything, but someone's gonna examine her later today and then we should have a much better idea of what happened. As you can imagine, it's a bit of a delicate situation, what with her being just a kid. Can't just have anyone going in and prodding her, can we?”

“But you're certain her mother is responsible?”

“We're struggling right now to see how there could be anyone else involved. Those bruises had to come from somewhere, and they're all over her face. It's impossible to believe it could have been an accident.” He sniffed again, as he folded the printout and slipped it into his pocket. “In my experience, these things always turn out to be exactly what they look like. The simplest explanation usually fits.”

“So if...” He paused again, imagining Emily sitting in a police cell.

“I really don't mean to detain you for too long,” Carver said finally, sounding a little bored. “If I could just take a brief statement regarding your thoughts on Ms. Stone's state of mind, I can be on my way and hopefully this can all get wrapped up pretty quickly. Unless you want to agree to her request, that is.”

“Request? No, I'm not going to see Emily Stone. Are you crazy? I'm not interested in that at all.”

“That's not actually what she wants,” Carver replied. “She asked us to speak to you about her daughter Elizabeth. That's who she wants you to see.”

***

“You're considering it?”

“God, no,” he muttered, as he continued to roll a fresh cigarette. They were sitting on a bench outside the university's cafeteria, with students hurrying past in every direction, and it was time for his post-lunch smoke, which he took daily with almost religious zeal at precisely 1pm. Sometimes, he was able to persuade Jenna to join him, even though he knew she hated the smell of cigarettes. “Do you think I'm insane?”

“Blatantly, but that's beside the point.”

He smiled.

“I think you're curious,” she continued, watching him with a hint of concern. “I can already tell you're thinking about the whole thing, I can see a spark of actual passion in your eyes, Rob, and it's been a long time since I could say that. Plus, if there's a child involved, don't you think you have an obligation to help?”

“That's just the point, I can't help. I'd just be helping to perpetuate this bullshit. It needs to end.”

“Sounds easy.”

“Yep.”

“And very convenient for you.”

“That too.”

“And there's not a part of you that finds this interesting?” She waited for a reply. “That part of you can't have died completely, Rob. I know it's scrunched up in your soul somewhere.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“It can't have died,” she continued. “I know you got burned twenty-four years ago, and I know you made a conscious effort to change course, but you're still the same man you were back then. Older, crustier, with a little more of a gut, but you haven't changed that much, I know it. At least, that's the hope I've been clinging onto all these years.” She paused again, hoping that he'd start to come around to her way of seeing things. “Don't you remember what it was like to be young and curious? To think that there might be things out there that we don't understand? To want to help people?”

“And then to get shat upon by liars and hoaxers?”

“You used to believe in possibilities. I miss that version of you.”

He opened his mouth to tell her not to be so sentimental, but after a moment he saw that there was a hint of pain in her eyes. It was almost as if she longer for the days when, in their twenties, they used to sit around talking about the possibility of ghosts being real.

“Why would you say something like that?” he asked, forcing a smile, hoping to make a joke of it all. “I wouldn't have told you about the email and the detective's visit if I thought you were going to make it into a thing.” As he finished rolling the cigarette, he realized she was simply staring at him, as if something was on her mind. “What?” he asked. “You're creeping me out.”

“Forget it,” she said finally, getting to her feet and hauling her backpack onto her shoulder. “Do what you think is right.”

“Do what's right? I'll tell you what's right. Abandoning all that stupid research all those years ago, after it became clear that the field was dominated by hoaxers, that was right. Accepting that I was on the wrong path, that was right.”

“And you never replaced that work with anything else,” she pointed out. “Your curiosity, your passion... You let those things wither and die.”

“Thanks for the lecture.”

“You never got upgraded to an office with windows.”

“Windows wouldn't suit my personality.”

“Ouch.”

He laughed. “What?”

“Nothing, just... If you'd asked me all that time ago how I thought you'd end up, I would never have guessed it'd be like this.”

“I'll take that as a compliment.”

A sad smile crossed her face.

“It's none of my business,” he added. “Emily Stone is in the past. I don't believe in any of that crap, not anymore.”

“Let's assume you're right,” she continued. “Let's assume there's no such thing as ghosts, never has been, never will be. Let's assume the whole idea is just a figment of humanity's collective imagination, something we use to scare ourselves. If that's true, then what's really going on here?”

“With Emily and her daughter?” He paused. “Emily is obviously mentally unbalanced, probably as a result of the lies her mother made her tell when she was a child. Now that she's an adult herself, she's perpetuating those lies and trying to use her own daughter to have another shot at the whole thing, most likely because that's how she was brought up, because it's how she was taught to see the world. It's possible she's doing it cynically, because she thinks she can make money, but this time I think the more likely explanation is that she really believes it's true. It's very sad, really. Nothing to do with me, I hasten to add, but sad all the same.”

“So you think she gave the bruises to her daughter?”

“Maybe she doesn't even remember doing it, but... Yes, that's the most rational explanation.”

“They were on the girl's face, right?”

He nodded.

“So you're saying that she beat her daughter's face? She sat there and pummeled her own daughter's face, and now she's forgotten doing it? Instead, she thinks a ghost did it all?”

Lighting the cigarette, he took a drag and then blew smoke out. “I'm saying that.”

“Kind of extreme, don't you think?” she asked.

“People are extreme sometimes.”

“And that doesn't interest you?”

“Of course, but -”

“Remember the book you were going to write when you thought Joyce and Emily were telling the truth all those years ago?”

He smiled. Twenty-four years ago, the idea had been so fresh and vibrant; now it just seemed like the kind of youthful over-exuberance that older men were glad to have slipped.

“I'm serious,” she continued, nudging his arm. “You had notes for it, remember? You'd even started to write parts of the damn thing.”

“That was when I thought Emily and her mother weren't full of shit.”

“I used to sit on the bed in your flat,” she added, “wearing one of your old shirts, proof-reading the early chapters.”

“You always took that stuff too seriously.”

“That was good work, Rob,” she continued, with just a hint of frustration in her voice. “I used to wake up in the middle of the night and find that you'd got up to go through and start scribbling some more.”

“I didn't want to wake you.”

“You had passion back then. You were driven.”

“Passion's overrated. It's juvenile.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “Passions blinds us.”

She stared at him with a hint of sadness in her eyes, before looking away, as if she didn't like what she was seeing.

“Let's not talk about it anymore,” he said after a moment.

She forced a smile, before hearing a beeping sound in her pocket. Taking out her phone, she saw she had a missed call.

“It's Tom,” she said, taking a deep breath. “You're right, this is dumb. I should go and -”

“It was going to be a bestseller,” he said suddenly, hoping to keep her from walking away. “I was really full of myself back then, I thought I'd discovered the mother-lode. I had all these ambitions. A book tour, lectures... Do you remember how we once planned to combine the whole thing with our honeymoon and -” He paused, suddenly realizing that this was the first time in many, many years that he'd mentioned their broken engagement. “Well, you know what I mean.”

“Youthful over-exuberance?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

“I do remember,” she told him, “and a lot has changed, but you can still write that book. If it's not about ghosts, then it can be about a woman who grew up and was unable to throw off the shackles of her childhood, and about how her mother screwed with her mind. And it can be about a man who believed her and had his faith broken. Whatever you choose to focus on, there's still a book to be written about Emily Stone's story. And yours.” She paused for a moment. “Besides, the Robert Slocombe I know, the Robert Slocombe I spent a lot of time with back in the day, would never just leave a little girl to suffer if he thought he could help.”

“I can't help. Plus, Emily's not a little girl anymore. I can't go back and -”

“I don't mean Emily. I mean her daughter. You could at least drive up there and meet the girl, hear what she has to say, find out what's really happening. Maybe you couldn't do anything for her, but maybe, just maybe, you could. Either way, you've got a unique insight into the situation. It'd be a shame if you didn't do anything with that insight, but... Just make your own decision. Do what you think is right.”

“Don't say that,” he replied. “You always tell me to do what I think is right. It's your way of tricking me into agreeing with you!”

“I have to go and call my husband back.”

“What am I supposed to do, then?” he asked as she turned and walked away. “Jenna? I won't let you guilt-trip me into doing this! There's no way I'm heading off up the country to talk to some little girl whose mother has lost her mind! It'd be completely pointless!” He waited for her to look back at him, to stop and say something, but she just kept on walking. “Jenna! This isn't going to work! If you think for one moment that you can manipulate me like this, you're wrong!”

He waited, but she was gone.

Chapter Nineteen

Twenty-four years ago

“Emily! Get your lazy arse out of bed!”

With the curtains still closed, the room was mostly dark despite the sunlight outside. After a moment, footsteps could be heard thumping up the stairs, and finally the door was flung open as Joyce Stone burst in. She immediately headed over to the window and pulled the curtains open, letting sunlight stream through as she breathed out more smoke from her cigarette.

“Come on, you,” she continued, turning to look over at the bed, “that's enough laziness for one morning. Up.”

She waited half a second.

“Are you deaf?” she shouted, grabbing the bottom of the duvet and pulling it away, to reveal Emily on her side, curled up in a ball as if she was trying to make herself as small as possible. “Downstairs! Now!”

She waited, with her cigarette still in her mouth, but Emily didn't even turn to look at her.

“Alright,” Joyce continued, stomping over to her, “listen, I've had enough of your -”

Stopping suddenly, she sniffed the air, before taking a closer look at the sheets.

“What the hell's going on in here?” she barked. “Have you pissed yourself?”

***

“Bloody hell,” Joyce muttered a short while later, as they sat at the kitchen table with the washing machine running nearby. “What a lovely way to start the day. Pulling wet sheets off a bed.”

“I'm sorry,” Emily whispered, staring down at the bowl of cereal she still hadn't touched. There were tears in her eyes, but she knew she shouldn't cry.

“What's wrong with you today?” Joyce asked. “You look all pale.” She grabbed the remote control and used it to turn up the volume on the TV in the corner. Switching the cigarette to her right hand, she reached over with the left and felt the girl's forehead. “You're a bit clammy too. Are you sick?”

Emily stared at her, but didn't say anything.

“I can't be doing with this today,” Joyce continued, putting her cigarette back in her mouth. “Of all the days for you to start fucking about, girl, why'd you have to choose today? You know I've got a date tonight, and I've gotta sign on before I pick up something from the shop. There's no way you can stay home from school, not even if you've got bloody dengue fever, so you'll just have to pull your britches up and get on with it. You're gonna be on your own tonight, so -”

“No!” Emily said suddenly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You can't go out!”

“What's wrong?” Joyce asked, with a faint smile. “Scared?”

“No, but -”

Looking up at the ceiling, Emily paused for a moment, with fear in her eyes.

“You're not half acting queer this morning,” Joyce continued, “it's putting me right off my breakfast. You know that, yeah? Are you doing it on purpose? Did you decide when you woke up that today was gonna be the day you'd just start pissing me off? Bloody hell, if your dad was still around, God bless his soul, I don't know what he'd make of you.”

“I don't want to be by myself tonight,” she replied, still looking up at the ceiling. “Not here.”

“What's wrong with here?”

“Haven't you -” Turning to her mother, Emily paused again. “Don't you ever hear it?”

“Hear what? The sound of your whining voice?”

“It's...” Another pause. “Mum, do you think...”

“Do I think what? That you're a pain in the arse? Sometimes, yeah.” She laughed at her own joke, before glancing over at the TV.

“Do you ever think there's a ghost here?”

Joyce let out another laugh, before taking the cigarette out of her mouth so she could eat a spoonful of cereal. “Pull the other one,” she muttered, with her mouth full. “It's got bells on.”

“I'm not lying,” Emily continued. “I've been hearing weird noises for a while, and then last night...” Her voice trailed off as she realized that her mother thought she was an idiot. Frowning, she tried to work out how she could get anyone to believe her.

“Last night what? Did you see a sheet hovering over your bed?”

“No, I -”

“Did it have piss stains on it? 'Cause then we know it's one of yours.” She laughed again.

“I mean it,” Emily said firmly, still struggling to keep from crying. “It's like... I saw something in my room last night, something moving. At first it was standing in front of the window, and then...” She paused as she remembered the moment the figure had climbed onto the bed. “Then it got on the bed with me,” she whispered, “and it started crawling up, and I couldn't stop it, and it got all the way up and it started whispering in my ear. It was a woman.”

“There was a strange woman on your bed?” Joyce replied skeptically.

Emily nodded.

“Maybe you really have got a fever, kid,” Joyce continued, checking her temperature again. “Hallucinating, are you?”

Emily shook her head.

“Then what's all this guff about?”

“She told me about the place she was from,” Emily replied, “and she told me she wanted to get out. She called it the dead place, and...” She paused yet again, as a shiver passed through her body. “She told me she wanted to get out through me, like I'm some kind of door, but I didn't really understand what she meant. She said she'd be back, and she said that time didn't pass the same way for her as it does for me, but that she was going to find a way to break through. She told me she'd climbed up to reach the inside of my soul and that she'd been watching me for a long time, waiting for the right moment...”

She sat in silence for a moment, trembling as tears ran down her face, desperate for her mother to believe her.

“So when did you piss yourself?” Joyce asked finally, with a grin. “Before she got on the bed with you or after?”

“Mum -”

“Pull the other one,” she continued, “for God's sake. Bloody hell, kid, you've got quite an imagination, I'll give you that. Must be all those stupid cartoons you watch, they've warped your mind and made you a bit simple. I'll tell you something right now, my girl, and you'd do well to remember it, there ain't no such thing as ghosts. Ghosts are just stories people tell to scare each other.”

“I saw her,” Emily whimpered.

“You saw her? Like, what, a gray lady? In this house? Place was only built in the 70s, there hasn't been time for anyone to start haunting it.”

“I saw her,” Emily said again, although she could tell there was no point.

“Yeah, well...” Joyce sighed. “Bollocks,” she muttered under her breath. “The only people who actually believe in ghosts are bloody idiots,” she continued. “You see 'em in the paper sometimes, selling their stories, or trying to. Always with these ropey photos and talking about sheets flying through the air. It's never exactly believable, but people lap it up.” She tapped the end of her cigarette on the ashtray, before turning back to Emily and seeing the look of terror on her daughter's face. “You're more convincing that most of 'em,” she added, “but -”

She paused suddenly, and finally a faint frown crossed her brow.

“Do you really believe some spooky old cow was on your bed?” she asked finally, grabbing the remote again and using it to mute the TV.

“I saw her,” Emily replied, her voice tense with fear. “I heard her talking to me.”

“Yeah, but...” Joyce paused again, watching Emily's expression with a growing sense of interest. Glancing at the silent TV, she saw that Eamonn Holmes was interviewing a woman, and the caption on the bottom of the screen said the story was about someone being bullied at school. “People get a lot of money for stuff happening to 'em,” she muttered after a moment, before turning back to Emily. “Real life experiences, that kinda thing. You know, you'd look good on the front page of a paper. You've got that slightly gormless but very cute thing going on. People'd believe you.”

“You don't believe me,” Emily whispered.

“I don't have to, sweetie-pie, it's more about...” She took another drag on her cigarette and glanced at the TV again, before looking over at a pile of old Take a Break magazines by the phone. “There's money in that kind of story, you know. Aunt Pat got fifty quid for a story about her Barry eating a hamster, and I bet you they pay more for stuff about ghosts. Barry didn't even eat the bloody hamster, he just bit it, so we're already one up on him. We'd have to pad things out a bit, of course, maybe get some proof, but there might be a market for a story about ghosts.”

Emily frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean... Do you think you could tell that same story to someone else? Maybe to lots of people?”

“Why?”

“Because they'd be interested.”

“Do you think they'd be able to help?” Emily asked. “I just want the woman to go away.”

“That's good,” Joyce replied. “Just like that.”

“Just like what?”

“People love ghost stories, don't they? Dunno why, I've never been a big fan myself, but the big London papers'd definitely pay out a few hundred quid, maybe more.” Getting up, she dragged her chair around the table and set it next to Emily, before sitting down again and putting an arm around her daughter. “Come on, it'll be fun. We'll just mess around a little with the whole thing and give people a nice fright. You just have to tell 'em what you told me, make it all spooky like, and we might even make enough for a holiday this year. You've always wanted to go to Majorca, haven't you?”

“Where's -”

“Do it for me,” Joyce continued. “You love your old mum, don't you? I wouldn't get you to do something if it was wrong.”

“What about...” Emily paused for a moment. “She told me about the dead place where -”

“Keep it simple,” Joyce added. “You don't wanna go complicating it too much, let's just get some blurry photos, add some detail, and then I'll ring round the local papers. You'd like to be famous, wouldn't you?” She leaned over and kissed the side of Emily's head. “We can even buy you a new dress, just for the occasion. Wouldn't that be nice, eh? Come on, Em, don't be so stiff about the whole thing.”

Emily opened her mouth to reply, but she was starting to feel uncomfortable. She wanted her mother to help her, to make the woman in her bedroom go away. Instead, she felt as if she was going to be paraded in front of people.

“I need to get hold of a camera,” Joyce said finally. “We're gonna need photos if we wanna pull this off. Don't worry, Em, it'll just be a bit of fun. It's not like anything can go wrong”

Chapter Twenty

Today

“Where is she?”

Getting up from the chair on the far side of the interview room, Emily hurried to the door as her lawyer entered, only for him to hold his hands up in order to keep her back. Two police officers were out in the corridor, evidently ready to force her back into the room if necessary.

“She's fine,” the lawyer said. “A doctor has checked her over. You can't see her right now, but -”

“Then when?” Emily asked. “Is she okay? Have they fed her? She can't eat chocolate, it gives her headaches, and you have to tell them not to let her use too much salt on her food, because if she's allowed, she'll cover everything in salt, she loves it. And they -”

“Emily -”

“She'll eat salad, but only if -”

“Emily, calm down.”

“Don't tell me to calm down!” she shouted. “Where's my daughter?”

“She's being looked after.”

“By who?”

“By...” He paused for a moment, clearly feeling uncomfortable. “She's been taken to a center that specializes in looking after children when they've been through... experiences...” Sighing, he checked his watch. “Please, just take a seat and we can talk things through. We have a lot to cover and I have other clients to see today.”

“I want to see my daughter,” she said firmly.

“That's not going to be possible right now.”

“I want to get out of here and see my daughter!”

“We need to talk about that. Emily, please -”

“I haven't done anything wrong,” she replied, pushing past him and heading to the door, only for one of the police officers to stand in her way. “You have no right to keep me here!” she shouted. “I haven't done anything!”

“Come and sit down,” the lawyer told her.

She turned to him, infuriated by his calmness. “Why?”

“Because we have a lot to talk about.”

“No, we have nothing to talk about. I have to go to my daughter, she needs me, she'll be scared without me!”

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding up a collection of papers.

“I don't care. I just have to -”

“It's a doctor's report,” he continued, “written by the man who examined Lizzie a few hours ago. He took a look at the bruises on her face, and it's good news, Emily.”

“What -” She paused for a moment. “What do you mean? What's good news?”

“I mean he determined that her bruises were definitely not caused by fists or any kind of beating. This helps your case.”

“Why do I need a case? I would never hurt her!”

“Sit down.”

“What exactly does it say?”

“It says that the bruises seem to have...” He paused, before looking down at the papers. “Well, I know this is going to sound a little strange, but he says he needs to get someone else to look at her because at the moment the bruises seem to have come from the other side of her skin.”

“The other side?”

“As if someone hit her from inside. The medical term he used was subcutaneous trauma, but to be honest, I don't think he quite knew what to make of it.”

“That's -” Suddenly, she thought back to the moment when Lizzie had been standing in the dark bedroom.

“They're going to run some more tests,” the lawyer told her. “They need to rule certain things out.”

“Like what?”

“Just some medical things, conditions that might cause spontaneous bruising.”

“Is she...” Pausing, Emily tried to stay calm. “Is she in pain?”

“I don't believe so, no.”

“Has she been asking for me?”

“Why don't you sit down,” the lawyer continued, “and tell me, in your own words, exactly what happened to you and your daughter last night?”

“I can't.”

“You have to.”

“You'll think I'm...” Her voice trailed off.

“I can assure you, I'm not going to laugh at anything you tell me. The situation is far too serious.”

Pausing for a moment, Emily finally began to make her way back to the chair.

“If I tell you the truth,” she said as she sat down, “you'll have me locked away.”

“You're already locked away,” he pointed out, as the police officer shut the door and left the two of them alone. “No-one's going to punish you for telling the truth, Emily. The truth sets us free, always and all ways. Sometimes, though, it takes a great deal of courage to tell the truth, and I suspect that's the position you're in right now.”

“But the -”

“I need the truth,” he said firmly. “Just strip it down, bare bones and all, and let me worry about what it means. For now, you just have to tell me, in your own words, what really happened.”

“Did they contact him?”

“Who?”

“Doctor Slocombe.”

“I believe someone has been in touch with him, yes. I don't know whether he agreed to get involved in the case, and frankly I don't think it's relevant at the moment.”

“He's the only one who'd understand,” she replied. “He was there when it happened before.”

“When what happened before?”

“The -” She paused again. “I can't...”

“Just tell me the truth, Emily. And remember, I'm on your side. Everything you tell me is strictly confidential, nobody's recording our conversation and nobody's listening in. It's just you and me.” He checked his watch. “Come on, let's get this show on the road.”

She took a deep breath. “You'll think I'm crazy. Or lying.”

“I won't, I promise.”

“But I...” She paused, close to tears, before managing to pull herself together. “What happened to Lizzie is the same thing that happened to me,” she said finally, her voice trembling slightly. “She's twelve now, and I was twelve back then. I can't explain it, I don't know the details, but I swear to God, it's the same.”

“You're referring to the events that were featured in several national papers when you were a girl?”

She nodded.

“But I was under the impression that those events were part of a hoax,” he continued. “Your mother admitted as much, did she not?”

“That's the problem,” he replied, “it was a hoax, except... Not at the beginning. At the very beginning, the first few times, it was real.”

“So the hoax was built on top of something that you perceived to have really happened?”

“It did really happen,” she hissed, leaning forward before remembering that she had to stay calm. Sitting back again, she tried to focus. “Something really happened, I didn't make up the first couple of times, or the part about there being a voice that told me things.” She paused, remembering the morning, long ago, when her mother had first suggested the hoax. “She twisted it,” she added with a shiver. “She made it something else, something wrong. She got me to lie, and to pose for those photos, and it blew up and became something massive. All the stuff about things flying around the house and figures in the doorways, all the photos and the videos... They were all staged by my mother, but there was a core of truth at the heart of it all, and that's the part that has come back and...”

Her voice trailed off, and they sat in silence for a moment.

“And hurt Lizzie?” the lawyer asked finally. “Is that your contention? Some kind of spirit or paranormal force is responsible for everything that has happened in the past twenty-four hours?”

She nodded.

“I have to tell you,” he continued, “that in a court of law, it's going to be very difficult to make those claims.”

“You wanted the truth,” Emily replied, with tears in her eyes. “This is the truth.”

“And this ghost, or whatever it is, caused the bruises on Lizzie's face?”

She nodded again.

“I see,” he muttered, making some notes on a pad of paper.

“We need to find somewhere else,” she told him. “I don't have any money, I don't have anyone I can stay with...”

“Don't worry about that right now.”

“Then where the hell are we going to sleep tonight?” she asked, as her desperation began to build again. “You don't get it, do you? That hotel room last night used up almost everything I've got left! I can't even work, because wherever I go, people find out who I am and they make my life hell! We're living off benefits, and even those are shrinking.”

“Well,” the lawyer replied cautiously, “you could work, it just might be uncomfortable. Maybe you have to ignore the brickbats people throw at you. Develop a tough skin, so to speak.”

She shook her head.

“You could try,” he added. “If not for your own sake, then for your daughter's.”

“I worked in a factory for a few weeks in November,” she replied. “At first I thought it was going to be okay, that I'd finally managed to get away from the past. And then one morning they all started making ghost noises. Someone had found out about what happened when I was a little girl, and for the next few days they just made more and more jokes. I tried to ignore them, but I was so nervous, I just ended up making mistakes until eventually I was fired. Then I tried finding online work, but I'm no good at that kind of thing, and now...” Looking down at her hands, she felt tears in her eyes. “I can't take Lizzie back to that house, but there's nowhere else for us to go. I'm scared they'll make her go to her father, which would be a disaster.”

“Have you considered changing your name? It'd be one way to try putting the past well and truly behind you?”

“Maybe I should have done that a long time ago,” she replied. “I'll start looking into it tonight, once I've got Lizzie back.”

“Emily,” the lawyer said after a moment, “the protective custody order for Elizabeth is for one month. That means she's going to be at the care home for thirty nights.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, shocked by the idea.

“I mean you won't be with her tonight.”

“No, I have to be with her!”

“It's not possible. Besides, you'll be transferred to a hospital so you can be examined and assessed, because the police want to understand your emotional state before they decide whether you can be released. You might get out tonight, or you might not. Most likely, the process will take a day or two.”

“I haven't done anything,” she replied, getting to her feet and hurrying to the door, only to find that it was locked. “Let me out of here! I have to go and find my daughter!”

“You're not helping yourself by getting upset,” the lawyer replied calmly. “Come and sit back down.”

“Where is she?” Emily asked, turning to him. “Where's Lizzie?”

“I can't divulge that information.”

“Where's my daughter?” she screamed. “I want to see her right now! She needs me! She -”

Before she could finish, the door was pushed open, knocking her forward as two police officers hurried through and grabbed her arms.

“It's okay,” the lawyer told them, “she's just a little -”

“Lizzie!” she shouted, trying to get free as the officers turned her around and pushed her firmly against the wall. “Lizzie, I'm coming! Lizzie!”

Chapter Twenty-One

“And you'll need this,” the receptionist added, sliding the key-card over to Robert. “Take the elevator to the fourth floor, turn left when you exit and you'll find room 405 at the first corner.”

***

“Jesus,” he muttered as he sat on the edge of the bed and felt a twinge of pain in his knees. “Oh... God...”

Looking around the room for a moment, he saw all the usual suspects of a mid-price hotel: a flat-screen TV, a single bed, a trouser-press he'd never use, a pile of glossy, useless magazines on the table by the window. Reaching into his pocket, he took out his phone and tried to call Jenna, only to get put straight through to her voice-mail.

“It's me,” he told her, “I just... Well, I arrived, and now I'm kicking my heels for the night. This whole thing seems insane, but...” He paused, trying to imagine her reaction when she heard the message. “I hope you're right,” he continued finally. “I hope this really is the right thing to do. I've got a horrible feeling it could blow up in my face and make things worse for everyone.” Another pause. “Give me a ring when you get this.”

Cutting the call, he tossed the phone aside.

“What am I doing here?” he whispered, leaning back on the bed and staring up at the stationary fan. “Damn you, Jenna, why did I let you talk me into this?”

***

“You have to understand that Lizzie only arrived with us three days ago,” Catherine explained the following morning as they headed along the corridor, “and we don't try to push them too hard in the early stages. We like to let the children get used to their new surroundings before we really move into the tough questions. Some of them are very damaged.”

“Of course,” he replied. As soon as they stopped at a window overlooking the main play area, he spotted a little girl with a bruised face sitting all alone, and he knew she was the one he'd come to see. She even looked like Emily, enough to send a shiver down his spine.

“She misses her mother,” Catherine continued, with a hint of sadness in her voice. “All she asks about is when she's going to see her again. One thing I can say for certain is that she's definitely not scared of going back to her, although the house is another matter.”

“Is Emily not allowed to visit?”

“Emily...” She paused. “I don't know how much you've been told, but Emily Stone was committed on a non-voluntary basis to a psychiatric facility at the hospital in Mellingham. From what I gather, she had an episode at the police station when she was informed that she wouldn't be able to see Lizzie for a while. She had to be restrained by officers, and I think she even managed to give one of them a cut lip before they got her under control.”

“So she's not going anywhere in the near future,” Robert muttered.

“They might release her at any time, but she certainly won't be told where Lizzie's being kept.”

“And then what?”

“We have Lizzie for another twenty-seven days, minimum, but I imagine we'll find a home to take her after that. My understanding is that given her emotional state and the continued questions surrounding recent events, Ms. Stone would be unlikely to gain custody of her daughter any time soon.”

“What about Lizzie's father?”

“He lives in Scotland and has indicated that he can't take her right now.”

“She looks...” Pausing for a moment, Robert watched as Lizzie flicked through a book. He still wasn't entirely sure why he'd made the journey, although he'd assumed it was due to some ill-advised attempt to show Jenna that he could still rouse himself to action; now, however, he realized for the first time that he actually might be able to help Lizzie, and that there was a real danger the girl could end up losing her mind, just like Emily. “She looks sad,” he said finally. “I remember her mother had the same look about her, back in the day.”

“Do you have children, Doctor Slocombe?”

He shook his head, while keeping his eyes fixed on Lizzie.

“She's a very sweet girl,” Catherine continued. “Kind of quiet, maybe shy, definitely reserved, but also intelligent.” Reaching out, she knocked gently on the window. When Lizzie looked over at them, Catherine gestured for her to come out. “She also has the loudest nightmares of any child who's ever been here.”

“Loud?” he asked.

“Screaming in the middle of the night. Pure terror in her eyes, waking up covered in sweat, and just... shaking, her whole body, right to the core. Sometimes the fear is so bad, she's soiled herself. The craziest part is, she always swears she doesn't remember what the nightmares are about.”

***

“Nothing,” Lizzie whispered, staring down at the floor with tired, worried eyes. She'd clearly been crying a lot.

“Nothing?”

She shook her head.

“But you wake screaming,” Robert continued, making a note in his journal. “Don't you remember what you were dreaming about in the moments before that? Not even little flashes?”

She paused for a moment, and then she shook her head again.

“Are you telling me the truth?”

She paused again, before looking over at him.

“I understand that you might want to lie,” he told her, “but there's really no point.”

“I...” Another pause. “I'm not lying.”

“And what about all the pauses?” he asked. “Every time I ask you a question, you seem to pause, as if you need to think about your answer first.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but no words came out.

“Did your mother teach you to do that?”

No reply.

“Oh, the irony,” he muttered, making another note. “If your dreams -”

“There are people,” she said suddenly.

He looked back at her. “What kind of people?”

“Dead people.”

He watched her for a moment. She looked so much like Emily, the resemblance was uncanny, and Robert couldn't shake the feeling that he was falling for exactly the same trick as before, albeit one generation later. Still, he felt he was better placed to deal with lies this time around, since he was approaching the situation from a position of skepticism rather than belief. He'd also learned to never trust anyone, not even a child.

“What kind of dead people?” he asked cautiously.

“Shouting,” she replied, as her voice started to tremble a little. “Screaming. They want to get out.”

“Out of where?”

“The dead place.”

He allowed himself a faint smile as he realized Emily must have coached the girl. After all, this part of the story was simply too familiar. “Did your mother tell you that's what it's called?”

She shook her head.

“Then who did?”

She wriggled on her seat a little. “The voice.”

“And what voice is that?”

She paused, and then she shrugged.

“But these dead people in their dead place,” he continued. “Do they want to get out and come here? Is that what you're saying?”

“The voice says they want to come through people. Certain people. People who make good doors.”

“And you're a good door?”

She nodded.

“Just like your mother, huh?” he asked.

“I don't know. The voice didn't say anything about her.”

“Right.” He made another note. “This is actually quite similar to the things your mother told me a long time ago, Lizzie. Almost word for word, in fact.”

“Mummy told you about the dead place?” she asked with a hint of surprise in her voice. “Have you seen her? Is she here?”

“No, she's not here, she's... She's somewhere else, Lizzie.”

“I want to see her.”

“You can't. Not right now.”

Lizzie frowned, as if she was focusing on holding back the tears.

“Has your mother talked to you about this a lot?” he asked. “Did she tell you what you can and can't tell me?”

She shook her head.

“It's okay if she did,” he continued. “I just need to know.”

“She didn't. The dreams are... They didn't start until I came here.”

“So you feel as if whatever was in the house has followed you to this place?”

She paused, as if she was giving the matter great thought, before finally nodding again.

“More pauses?” he asked, with a faint smile.

No reply.

“And we're, what, about twenty miles from the house?” He made another note. “On a scale of one to ten, Lizzie, with one being -”

“It said the Myrkia is true,” Lizzie said suddenly.

“The -” He paused. “I'm sorry?”

“I think that's the word. Myrkia? Morkia? The voice said that everything written in the Myrkia will come true. I asked what that meant. Mummy didn't know, but the voice said...”

She paused again, as if she was too scared to continue.

“The Myrkia? Well, Lizzie, that's a...” For a moment, he felt a sensation he hadn't felt for a long time, as if he was entering the shadow of something he didn't understand. “It sounds to me,” he continued finally, “as if your mother has been talking to you a lot, even if you don't want to admit it. Tell me something, does she spend a lot of time on the internet, looking things up?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, you don't want to...” He sighed, trying to work out how best to explain things to a child. “You were probably raised to think that your mother is always right and that she always tells the truth, but you need to understand that sometimes adults get... poorly. They start saying things that are wrong, and it can be hard to know what to believe and what to ignore.”

“Mummy didn't tell me about the Myrkia,” she replied. “It was the voice that told me about it.”

“Is that really true, Lizzie?” He paused for a moment, hoping to give her time to think and to reflect on what she was saying. “Your mother is sick and she might have tried to persuade you that a voice has been talking to you, but if you think really hard about everything that has happened, you'll realize that maybe she's made you remember things that aren't real. For example -”

“The voice told me,” she said firmly.

“I'm sure that's what your mother -”

“Everything in the Myrkia is going to come to pass,” Lizzie continued, with a hint of fear in her voice. “Everything. That's what the voice told me. The age of chaos, the opening of the dead space, the rise of the twelve-sided god, it's all true.” She paused, fixing him with a determined, unblinking stare, and then slowly she lowered her head, looking down at her shoes. “The voice told me about the place she's trying to escape,” she continued. “She said the world of the dead is like the world of the living in some ways, that...”

He waited for her to finish.

“That what?” he asked finally.

No reply.

He waited.

“Lizzie?”

After a moment, he realized she seemed to be whispering to herself. He couldn't see her face, but he could tell her lips were moving and he could hear the faintest, softest voice.

“Lizzie, can you look at me?”

He waited again.

“Lizzie, I want you to look at me.”

No reply.

Sighing, he got to his feet and moved his chair closer, finally sitting down next to her.

“Lizzie,” he said after a moment, “I'm here to help you. I don't know if your mother threatened you or told you bad things would happen if you told the truth, but I'm worried -”

“Hello again,” Lizzie said suddenly, still looking down. This time, however, her voice sounded darker and deeper, almost as if someone else was speaking through her.

“Hello, Lizzie.” He paused. “Did your mother teach you to -”

Suddenly Lizzie looked up at him, staring with unblinking eyes and the faintest of smiles.

“Right,” he continued, trying not to let her see that he felt unnerved. “Your mother coached you to give this little performance, did she?”

“I knew you'd be here again,” Lizzie told him, tilting her head slightly. “I've seen you before.”

“You have?”

“I've looked out of this place through other eyes,” she continued, “and you were there. You were younger, but it was definitely you.”

Sighing, he made a note on his pad.

“It took me so long to climb up here,” Lizzie continued, as her voice became even deeper. “I'm a much better climber than the others.”

“And what exactly have you been climbing up?” he asked.

“The wall of souls,” she replied. “I had to reach one near the top, one I could look out through and see you. One I might be able to break through, in time.”

“Lizzie -”

“The wall,” she continued, “is vast and huge. It rises up further than the eye can see, and it runs in both directions. I climbed for days, and I still can't see the top. The wall is made of the souls of living people, and most of them are strong but some... Some can be broken through. In this part of the dead place, we push and push at this wall, sometimes we climb up, trying to find one of the weak points. We scream and beg and claw at each other, trying to escape the darkness that surrounds us. All we want is to get through, to break into the light of our world, but it's so hard. I'm better than most of them, though. I can climb much higher.” Slowly, her smile began to grow. “I will get through eventually.”

Robert waited for her to continue, but she seemed lost in thought.

“Lizzie?” he said finally. “Did your mother tell you this story?”

“I won't let go,” she replied, as tears ran from her eyes and trickled down her bruised face. “It's so hard and my arms ache so much, but now I've come so far, I won't let go. I'll find a way to tear through this soul and reach your world again.”

She paused, holding her breath.

“Lizzie?” Robert asked finally.

No reply.

“Lizzie?” Looking over at the window, he saw that Catherine was waiting in the corridor, with a hint of worry in her eyes. Turning back to Lizzie, he saw that she'd closed her eyes. “Lizzie, I -”

Suddenly she opened her eyes again, but this time her eyes were gone, and there was something else in there. For a moment, it was as if Lizzie's eyes were two holes to another world, and on the other side there was something staring back through, something with dark gray skin and its own, yellowish eyes, something frantic and breathless, panicking and scratching at the inside of the little girl's face.

Before Robert could react, Lizzie screamed and lunged at him.

***

“I'll have to liaise with other agencies,” Catherine explained a short while later, once she and Robert had returned to her office. “There are a lot of stake-holders in this case.”

Staring out the window, Robert watched as a group of children played in the drab, concrete yard.

“You mustn't blame yourself for her reaction,” Catherine added. “She's damaged. You might not appreciate the way a parent can warp a child's mind, but if Emily Stone has been filling her daughter's head with this stuff for long enough, she could easily have affected the way Lizzie experiences reality. If you ask me, it's a form of abuse.”

She waited for him to reply.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Turing to her, he paused for a moment. There were a couple of scratches on his face, from the moment when Lizzie had knocked him onto the floor.

“I'm fine,” he told her. “I just... I wasn't expecting her to do that.”

“I can tell you're a little shaken up.”

He paused, thinking back to the creature he'd seen on the other side of Lizzie's face. He knew it had been a trick, that he'd just allowed himself to get caught up in Lizzie's madness and that his mind had fooled him, but still, he'd never had such a visceral reaction before.

“The important thing,” Catherine continued, “is to focus on the future, and to hope that the condition is reversible. We've had worse cases here, kids who've been through more than this, and we managed to help them. Now that she's away from her mother's influence, I really think we can start to deal with the traumas Lizzie has experienced and slowly but surely unwind a lot of it. The most important thing is to give her an environment where her mother can't get to her. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but when I'm called to speak to the panel that's considering the next best move, I'm going to have to recommend that Emily Stone has no contact with Lizzie at all, not for the foreseeable future.”

“You're probably right,” he replied, still running through the interview with Lizzie in his mind. “I should go,” he said finally. “I need to make a call.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“She's traumatized,” he continued, sitting on the end of his bed in the motel room as he talked to Jenna on the phone. “Whatever's happened to Lizzie Stone, it seems to have caused real damage to her mind. I think she actually believes this stuff.”

“Sometimes parents really fuck their kids up,” Jenna replied.

“There are a few things I want to run past Douglas when I get back tomorrow,” he told her, “but -”

“You're coming back so soon?”

“Do you think I should stay?”

“I don't know, I...” She paused, and after a moment he heard a faint sigh from the other end of the line. “I think you should do what you think is right.”

“No,” he replied, “don't say that again. Tell me what you think I should do. I'm not a psychiatrist, I have no experience with children, I have no role to fulfill in any of this -”

“You could talk to Emily Stone.”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“Because?”

“Because she's a liar. I can't trust a damn thing that comes out of her mouth, she just...” Sighing, he realized there weren't enough words in the English language to convey his horror at the idea.

“Are you sure you're okay?” she asked after a moment. “You sound kind of spooked.”

“I just -” Pausing, he considered telling her how the interview with Lizzie had ended, before realizing that she'd just laugh at him. “It's been a long day,” he said finally. “I'm tired.”

“Well, you asked for my opinion,” Jenna continued, “and I gave it to you. I think you should stay a few days more, see what you can do for Lizzie and maybe, just maybe, try to schedule a meeting with Emily Stone.”

“But why -”

“I've got to go,” she added suddenly. “Tom and I are about to watch a film and he's acting like a spoiled brat because I'm making him wait. Take care of yourself out there, okay? I'll see you when you get back.”

“I actually -” he began, before realizing that she'd hung up. “Enjoy the film,” he muttered.

***

A few minutes later, flicking through the films on the motel's in-room entertainment package, Robert tried to find something that would take his mind off his experience with Lizzie Stone. After a moment, his glance shifted and he found himself looking at the mini-bar.

***

“Number twelve!” the kid behind the counter called out. “Double with fries!”

Leaning past a group of teenagers, Robert took his tray and headed across the all-night restaurant. He'd only drunk a few of the whiskey shots from the mini-bar, so he was barely even tipsy. Finding a spare seat near the window, he set his tray down and then quickly tidied up the mess left by the previous customer. As he sat down, he glanced out the window and saw more teenagers on the far side of the parking lot. After a moment, one of them looked toward him with large, empty eyes.

Telling himself that he was tired and imagining things, he looked down at his food, picked up his burger, and started eating. When he looked up again, the teenagers were already walking away.

***

“Of course you can have the light on,” Catherine said as she set a glass of water next to Lizzie's bed. “We even have different settings, so you can have it on low and still sleep, but not be in the dark. Does that sound good?”

“Mummy's coming in to kiss me goodnight, isn't she?” Lizzie asked.

“Well...” Catherine paused. “Not tonight, sweetie. You just have to be brave.”

“When is she coming?”

“Not quite yet.”

“But when?”

“Don't worry, she's perfectly safe. She just has to do a few things for herself right now. That doesn't mean she doesn't love you, though. She loves you very much. You know that, right?”

Lizzie stared up at her for a moment, before nodding cautiously.

“And you're perfectly safe in here,” she continued. “Nothing can get to you, and someone will be on the desk at the end of the corridor all night.” She tapped the red button on the wall. “If you need help and you're too scared to get out of bed, just press that and there'll be someone here in thirty seconds max, okay?”

“Okay,” Lizzie whispered.

As Catherine headed out of the room, she glanced back and saw that Lizzie was staring at her. Once she was outside, she pushed the door shut and then headed to the desk, to tell the night-shift worker to pay particular attention to the new arrival. Lizzie, she explained, was particularly traumatized and was highly likely to call for someone during the night. There was already a note on the file, warning about Lizzie's nightmares and about the need to have someone around at all times. She was a special case, the note added; she had a wild imagination and she seemed to genuinely believe some of the things she claimed to see. Sedation, the note added, was a last-resort measure, but one that could be considered if all else failed.

Back in the room, Lizzie stared at the door, where a small window offered a view of the brightly-lit corridor outside.

After a moment, a dark shape moved past, too fast to be seen properly but...

Lizzie held her breath.

A few seconds later, she realized she could hear a faint buzzing sound coming from the light on the ceiling. She looked up and stared at the light, which began to flicker slightly, as if it was cycling at a slower speed than before. Within a few more seconds, the light had begun to pulse, fading between light and dark as the buzz became louder. Lizzie stared up, wide-eyed and terrified, still holding her breath, until the light suddenly blinked off.

Outside, Catherine hurried through the drizzle, heading to her car on the far side of the dark car park.

At the reception desk, the night worker had already left her post, heading to the storeroom to investigate a persistent bumping sound that had begun just seconds after Catherine had left. She knew she shouldn't leave the desk unmanned, but she figured she'd only be a couple of minutes, and that nothing bad could happen.

In her room, Lizzie continued to stare at the light, hoping against hope that it would come back to life. She knew that if she looked at the door, there would be someone watching her.

In the fast food restaurant, Robert Slocombe noticed that the light directly above his table was flickering.

Lizzie heard a faint scratching sound at the door.

In the store room, the night shift worker was still looking for the source of the bump she'd heard. She made her way past various shelves, but every time she was about to give up and go back to the desk, she heard the bump again. Sighing, she headed to the back of the room.

Closing her eyes, Lizzie listened as the handle slowly turned.

“Hello?” the night shift worker called out, looking along the dark aisles in the storeroom.

Making his way out of the fast food restaurant, Robert took a couple of steps toward his car before stopping and looking to his left. Over on the other side of the car park, beyond the group of teenagers, there stood a small, seedy-looking bar with a bright neon sign on top, proclaiming its name to be The Ocean. Almost on auto-pilot, he began to make his way over, which putting his hands in his pockets to check for change. As he got closer to the bar's front door, he saw out the corner of his eye that one of the teenagers had left her friends and was stepping toward him. He turned to look at her.

Lizzie's whole body was shaking as she sat on the bed, with her legs drawn up so that her knees were under her chin. She could hear the handle turning again and again, but the door was locked. Above, the light was still off, but she kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling, too terrified to look at the window in the door. Finally, she closed her eyes and began to squeeze them tight.

“You're free to go,” the warden said, as he handed a sheath of papers to Emily Stone.

“What?”

“It's midnight,” he replied, checking his watch again. “That's when the previous authority to hold you expired. It's been decided that you're allowed to leave, as long as you accept certain restrictions.”

“What restrictions?” she asked, before looking over at the door and seeing that her lawyer had returned. “What restrictions?”

As he got closer to the bar, Robert realized that one of the teenage girls had definitely detached herself from the rest of her group and was keeping pace with him. Even when he started walking faster, she kept up, and he tried to ignore her until finally he reached the door and turned to look back.

Her face was burning.

Still on her bed, Lizzie squeezed her eyes even tighter, until they hurt. Something was scratching at the door.

“Robert!” Jenna called out, sitting up in bed and looking around the dark room. She'd been dreaming, and although the details of the dream were already fading away, she was left with a strong sense of panic, as if vast, dark wings were unfurling in her chest. Looking over at the clock by the bed, she saw that it was just a couple of minutes after midnight. She grabbed her phone and checked for messages, but there were none. For a moment, she considered trying to call him, but then she realized she was probably just over-reacting, and the last thing she wanted was to let him know that she was worried.

“You okay?” Tom asked, rolling over to look at her from the other side of the bed.

“Yeah,” she replied, even though her heart was pounding. “Yeah, of course.”

“Leave her alone!” the girl shouted, grabbing Robert's shoulders and slamming him against the wall, as her face continued to burn. “She's mine!”

The window in Lizzie's door shuddered as a dark, burned hand pressed against the glass.

“Come on,” a voice whispered in the little girl's ear, the same voice she'd heard before at the house, the same voice that had once spoken through her mouth. “Tonight's the night. I could come in there and get you, but I want you to come to me. I need you to show me that you understand. It'll be so much easier if you just open the door for me. I need this. I need to see the world again.”

Deep down in the garden at Emily's house, the dead woman's skeleton twitched slightly.

In the corner of a dark room at a residential home on the edge of town, Joyce Stone sat in silence. Her milky white eyes stared at the shadows on the carpet, as a breeze outside caused the trees to rustle.

“The curfew is from 5pm until 8am, seven days a week,” explained the technician as he clicked the tag around Emily's ankle. “You have to be in your home during those hours. If you break the curfew, even by a minute, you'll be back here so fast, your feet won't even touch the ground.”

“And you can't make any attempt to contact Elizabeth,” the lawyer added. “Emily, I need you to promise me that you understand. There's a protective process in place now to keep her safe and you have to respect that, no matter how much you might disagree or how unfair it might seem. I'm confident we can regain custody for you in the long-run, but if you don't play by the rules, it'll be much more difficult to convince a judge that you can be trusted. Do you understand?”

“She needs me,” Emily whispered, watching as the technician finished adjusting her ankle monitor. “She's in danger.”

“No-one's in danger,” the lawyer said firmly. “Lizzie's going to be fine.”

Slowly, Lizzie swung her legs over the side of the bed and set her bare feet down on the cold linoleum floor. The bed creaked as she stood, and with her eyes still closed she began to make her way over to the door, as if some inner force was compelling her to move.

“Get the hell away from me!” Robert shouted, pushing the teenager back as she laughed.

“She needs me,” Emily said again, turning to the lawyer with tears in her eyes. “I can feel it, something's going to happen. You have to tell me where they've taken her!”

“No,” he replied, setting a sheet of paper in front of her, “you have to sign this, confirming that you understand the terms of your release. A court date has been set for the next hearing. Don't be stubborn, Emily, this is the best approach for everyone. Play by the rules and the rules will protect you.”

“Okay,” the technician said, pressing a button on the side of the ankle monitor, causing it to beep once. “You're all good to go.”

“What the hell's wrong with you?” the teenager shouted, stepping back. Her face was no longer burning, and she seemed disgusted by the sight of Robert. “I only asked if you had a light! Fucking drunk!”

He watched as she turned and stomped back toward her friends.

Reaching the door, Lizzie kept her eyes closed, even though she could tell someone was waiting for her on the other side. Slowly, she reached up and grabbed the handle.

***

“Open the door,” the voice said softly.

Lizzie shook her head. Her eyes were hurting so much now, she was worried she might damage them permanently, but she was too scared to look up at the window. Somehow, she knew what she'd see if she looked: a woman's face, staring back at her, with most of the skin hacked away to reveal bones beneath.

“Do you think I need you to open it?” the voice asked. “There are ten thousand different ways I could get through. I just want you to do it for me, so that I know you want to come with me. After everything I've been through, I can't stop now. I'm so close.”

“Please,” Lizzie whispered, “just go away.”

“Look at me.”

She shook her head again.

“Look at me, Elizabeth. If I was going to hurt you, don't you think I'd have done it by now? Don't you think I'd have done it to your mother, all those years ago?”

“Go away,” Lizzie hissed.

“I'm sorry I bruised your face,” the voice continued. “Sometimes I just... I get desperate. All I want is to leave this place, but if I'm going to do that permanently, I need to break out through the right soul. That's not you, Lizzie. You're beautiful and divine in many ways, but you're not quite weak enough. It would take too long. While our minds are touching like this, I need to find a way through your mother. Can you understand that? Can you understand how desperately I want to get out of the cold, dark place that I'm in?”

Lizzie tried to squeeze her eyes even tighter shut.

“At least look at me,” the voice said after a moment. “Will you deny me that?”

Slowly, Lizzie began to tilt her head up. She paused, holding her breath, and finally she realized that she couldn't control herself for a moment longer. Opening her eyes, she saw that there was a woman on the other side of the door, smiling at her through the window.

“You're...” Lizzie paused. “You're beautiful.”

“No,” the woman replied, “you're beautiful. I'm just taking this form so I don't scare you. It's a way of temporarily projecting myself so you can see me, but it's not what I need, not truly. I need to get out of this place.”

“What place?”

“The dead place. It's a corner of the darkness where dead souls clamor to force their way out through a wall of the the living. Most souls accept their deaths, but some, particularly those who died early or who were murdered, try to find a way back. I'm so close, Lizzie, I just...” She paused, as a faint crack began to form in the corner of the window, slowly spreading through the glass.

“No!” Lizzie shouted, letting go of the handle and taking a step back.

“No?” the woman asked, with a faint smile.

“Stop! Don't do that!”

“Do what?” The woman looked at the crack as it began to spread, filling the square of glass with tributary after tributary. “I'm not making this crack happen, Lizzie. You are, by trying to hold back the inevitable.”

Taking another step away from the door, Lizzie shook her head.

“Just a little further,” the woman replied with a smile, as a piece of glass began to come loose from the window. “Just a few more seconds...”

“No!” Lizzie shouted, as the glass shattered.

***

“What the -”

Realizing his phone was ringing, Robert sat back on his bar stool and fumbled through his pockets for a moment, before finally seeing that Catherine Maloney from the care home was trying to get through to him. He considered not answering, since he was onto his fifth whiskey of the night, but finally he tapped the screen to accept the call.

“It's almost one in the morning,” he told her. “If -”

“I need you to come back,” she stammered, her voice filled with panic, with the sound of sirens in the background. “We have a serious problem here.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“We've checked every camera,” Catherine explained as she led Robert along the corridor, “every exit, every window, every possible way out of the building, but we can't figure out how she got away.”

“And no-one heard anything?”

“Not until the glass broke. Fiona, the woman who was supposed to be on the night desk, had gone to one of the storage rooms to check on a sound she heard. By the time she realized something was wrong, it was too late and she reached the room after... Well, after whatever happened, had happened.”

“You said someone was supposed to be on the desk at all times,” Robert replied.

“They are, but she was only gone for -”

“At all times,” he said firmly. “What the hell kind of place are you running here?”

Rounding the corner, he saw a couple of police officers up ahead, examining the door to Lizzie's room.

“And her mother -” Robert began.

“That's where it gets complicated,” Catherine replied. “It seems Emily Stone was released a couple of hours ago, but not in time to get here and snatch Lizzie. The whole thing looks like a huge coincidence.”

As they reached the door, Robert saw that the glass panel was broken, with pieces of glass having been scattered into the room, covering the floor. He took a step forward, past the nearest police officer, and looked over at the bed in the far corner, where just a few hours earlier Lizzie had been settled down for the night.

“We take security very seriously,” Catherine continued after a moment. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. I'd just left for the night, I was one my way home when I got the call. As I said, we have cameras at all the exits.”

“But not on all the wards?”

“All the stairwells. The elevators. There's literally no way to get out of here without being seen.”

“Then maybe she's still here,” he replied. “Could she be hiding?”

“I don't see how, but we've already got people searching the building.”

“There's no blood,” he pointed out, taking a step forward and looking down at the glass on the floor. “Whatever broke the window, it was strong enough to send glass almost to the opposite wall. That's a pretty powerful force, and wherever Emily would have been standing, you'd think it might have hit her.” Heading to the bed, he saw a few small pieces of glass glinting on the sheets. “Nothing about this makes sense. Why didn't she hit the alarm on the wall?”

“That's what we're wondering too,” Catherine replied. “None of the children in the other rooms heard anything until the glass broke.”

“You had one job to do,” he muttered, looking down at the glass all around his feet. “You were supposed to keep her safe.” After a moment, he turned to Catherine. “You said they released Emily Stone. Where is she now?”

***

Unfastening his seat-belt, Robert stepped out of the car and onto the cold, dark street. Light rain was already starting to fall, which seemed somewhat appropriate since it had also been raining twenty-four years earlier, on his previous visit to the house. He'd tried to forget that moment in the intervening years, but now he had to admit that the memories were strong, that he remembered every detail.

As he reached the garden gate, he looked at the house and saw her.

Emily Stone was standing on the front step, staring straight at him.

***

“What do you mean, gone?” Emily asked, following him inside. “Gone where?”

“I told you everything I know,” he replied, switching on the light in the hallway before looking back at her. “Don't worry, the police are already on it.”

“I have to go after her,” she replied, turning to head back out.

“Are you insane?” he asked, grabbing her arm and looking down at the chunky monitor attached to her ankle. “If you so much as go to the garden gate during your curfew hours, that thing'll go off.”

“I don't care,” she told him, trying to get free of his grasp, “I have to find Lizzie!”

“They'll pick you up in a police car before you get anywhere,” he replied, still holding her back. “Don't be an idiot, Emily. Be smart and stay here for a moment while we figure something out. Come on, I know you're not a complete fool, despite everything your mother persuaded you to do.”

“Let go!” she shouted.

“Emily -”

“I swear,” she continued, trying to prize his fingers away from her arm, “if you don't let me go and find my daughter, I'll -”

“What?” he asked. “You'll force your way out and end up in another police cell? How will you be able to help her then?” Letting go of her arm, he took a step back. “Fine. Off you go. Be a complete idiot yet again.”

Turning, she hurried to the door, before stopping suddenly. After a moment, she turned to him. “Why are you here?

“I -” Pausing, he realized the truth: he was trying to prove to Jenna that he still cared about something. “I thought I might be able to help,” he lied. “The police said you wanted me to see your daughter, so I did that, despite my extremely strong reservations.”

“You saw Lizzie?”

He nodded.

She stepped toward him. “How was she?”

“Frightened.

“And her face?”

Mostly healed.”

“Did she asked about me?”

He shook his head.

“It's back,” she continued. “I know you probably think I'm a liar, and I understand that, I mean, I was a liar, all those years ago. But I'm not interested in having endless conversations going back and forth about whether or not there's anything in this house. There is, it's real, and the fact that my mother was a lunatic twenty-four years ago doesn't change a goddamn thing. If you can't accept that, then...” She paused, struggling to find the right words. “If you can't accept that, then it's your turn to fuck off. Thanks for the email, by the way.”

“I should call someone,” he replied, searching through his pockets for his phone. “She'll know what to do.”

“Lizzie knows things,” Emily continued, “things that I know, but that I didn't tell her. The thing in this house told her the same things it told me.”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” he replied.

“My daughter is missing,” she snapped. “Are you here to help or not?”

“I...” He paused. “I really think I need to make a phone call.”

“Enjoy that,” she replied, turning and heading back to the front door.

“Stop!” he shouted, hurrying after her. She'd already reached the gate by the time he caught her and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her back. “You really can't help Lizzie from the inside of a police cell!”

“I can't help her from here, either!” she pointed out. Looking up at the house for a moment, she seemed lost for words. “I can't stay in this house,” she added finally, “not after everything it took from me.”

“There's nothing in there,” he replied. “You have to move past the lies your mother made you tell!”

“You don't believe me?” she asked. “Fine, then help me. Whether I'm right or wrong, it doesn't really matter, does it? The only thing that matters is finding Lizzie, because I swear to you, I would give my life to make sure that my daughter is okay.”

“Is there anyone you can think of who might have taken her?”

“Only -” Still staring at the house for a moment, she stepped past him and looked up at the dark windows. “It doesn't want her,” she said finally. “It wants me. That's what it's using her for.”

“You've been living here all these years, haven't you?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Then if it wanted you, wouldn't it have taken you by now? Assuming there's anything in there at all.”

“It told me once that time doesn't work the same way in its world as in ours,” she replied, taking a few more steps toward the house. “Maybe it blinks, or turns away for a moment, and twenty years have passed for us. It told me so many things about the dead place, I can barely even remember it all.”

“The Myrkia,” he replied.

She turned to him.

“Most of the things you told me back then,” he continued, “come from an obscure old book called the Myrkia. The whole thing reads like the delusional rant of some crackpot with too much time on his hands. Your mother must have somehow ended up with a copy and then she fed you all that bullshit in an attempt to give you a story to tell.”

“She didn't tell me,” Emily replied. “It did! The thing in the house!”

He shook his head.

“What do I have to do to make you believe me?” she asked.

“How about you go back in time twenty-four years,” he replied, “and don't lie to me for six months about ghosts and monsters.”

“My mother -”

“Was a mad old bat who wanted to exploit you for money,” he continued, “I get that, but don't you think there's at least a chance that she got into your mind and now you can't remember what really happened and what was part of the lie? I'm not blaming you, Emily. I'm saying that your head got permanently messed up.” He sighed. “Only someone with some form of mental illness would believe in this kind of crap.”

“I thought you believed? Maybe not in this case, but in ghosts in general.”

“Not for a long time.”

“Because of me?”

He paused. “Because of you,” he said finally. “And because of the rest of it. A lot of people have gone looking for absolute, irrefutable proof that ghosts exist, and how many of them have actually found proof? None. Not one of them, not ever. Don't you think it's about time we just admit that there's nothing out there? I mean, what are the odds that after thousands of years of human history, proof of the paranormal is going to be found in a grubby little council house in the north of England?”

“Then where's my daughter?” she asked, with tears in her eyes. “Right now, I'm praying that you're right, because at least then it's possible that she escaped from that care home and she's on her way back to me. She's smart enough, you know. She could do that. But if I'm right, and if this thing is real, then I don't know what might have taken her, or what it's doing to her, or if I'll ever see her again, or even if -”

Before she could finish, there was a loud bump from the house.

“Lizzie!” Emily shouted, rushing back inside.

“Wait!” Hurrying after her, Robert reached the hallway just in time to see that she was heading upstairs. He waited for a moment, listening as Emily rushed from room to room, and then he watched as she made her way back down to the hallway.

“You heard that noise,” she said as she reached him, her voice trembling with fear. “Don't try to tell me it was the house settling.”

“It could have been any one of a hundred things,” he pointed out. “You're in an agitated state and you're liable to misinterpret the slightest sound as something more sinister.”

“Then stay tonight,” she replied. “I have no choice, I have this monitor on my ankle and, besides, I have to stay here and wait in case Lizzie comes back. I have to spent every night in the house that gave me all these nightmares as a child, but you? You can decide for yourself. You can walk away again.” Spotting flashing blue lights outside, she saw that a police car had pulled up.

“I guess they're here to tell you that Lizzie's missing,” Robert said. “I doubt it'll make any difference to your curfew hours.”

“Then stay,” she said firmly. “Help me, please.”

***

“Of course I'm staying,” he said a short while later, sitting in the kitchen as he talked to Jenna on the phone. He could hear Emily with the police in the next room. “I have to stay.”

“I'm proud of you,” Jenna replied, on the other end of the line. “You're doing the right thing.”

“You really think so?”

“What's up, Rob? Do you need my validation for every decision you make now?”

“No,” he replied, as if it was the most ridiculous idea he'd ever heard, “I just... This isn't going the way I expected.”

“Finding it hard to disprove everything she says?”

“The little girl vanished,” he continued. “Barring some kind of major security lapse at the care home, it's like Lizzie Stone just disappeared in the blink of an eye. I also...”

He paused, trying to work out how to explain the other things that had happened.

“You also what?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he muttered. “I think I'm losing my mind, that's all.”

“Have you seen something?”

“It's more complicated than that.”

“Do you know what's worse than someone blindly believing what they see?” she asked. “Someone refusing to believe what they see despite all the evidence. You need to be more objective, Rob. Come at this properly, without prejudices on either side.”

“I know,” he replied, “I just... I don't suppose you fancy a trip up here, do you?”

“Me?” she asked, sounding shocked.

“It'd save my phone bill.”

“You don't need me there.”

“Actually...” He paused, realizing that he was perhaps pushing a little too hard. “No, I'm fine,” he added, “I just thought you might be interested, that's all.”

“I think this is good for you,” she told him.

“Maybe,” he muttered. “I just want to help them find the little girl and then get out of here. You should have seen the room at the care home, Jenna. The window in the door was reinforced, there's no way anything should have been able to shatter it like that.”

“But you don't believe in paranormal activity anymore,” she pointed out, “so there must be another explanation. Or are you starting to open your mind to the possibilities once more, Doctor Slocombe? Should I tell Doug to put some champagne on ice?”

“It's just...” He paused for a moment, as he realized the police were leaving. “She's very convincing, that's all. I expected Emily Stone to have grown up and become this gibbering wreck, but she actually comes across very well. Smart, sane, caring... If I didn't know her history, I'd probably believe her myself.”

“Sounds like you're on the verge of that already,” Jenna replied. “Don't be afraid to change your mind, Rob. Remember when you told me that? It was right when we first met, and you said the most important thing for any academic, any scientist, is the ability to change your mind when you're presented with something new. You changed your mind once, in a big way. It's okay to do it again.”

“Maybe next time I call you, I'll be telling you ghosts are real and I'm convinced I'm about to get proof.”

“Maybe.”

“Like the old days,” he added.

She laughed.

He smiled.

“I should go,” she said after a moment. “It's barely five in the morning, you know. You're lucky I picked up the goddamn phone.”

“You love me too much not to,” he replied, before realizing with a flash of cold panic what he'd just said. “I...” He paused, hoping against hope that she hadn't heard.

“I really should go,” she said finally. Her tone of voice had changed; she sounded stiffer now, as if she'd closed herself off again.

“That was just a slip of the tongue, Jenna -”

“I know.”

“It was just...” He paused again. “I got caught up in the moment, probably because we were talking about the things we used to talk about when we...” Yet another pause. “I didn't mean it.”

“I know,” she replied. “Good night, Rob. Keep me posted about your progress. It's good to hear that you actually care about something again.”

He opened his mouth to tell her about his plans, but a moment later he heard a click as the call ended. Putting the phone down, he leaned back and took a deep breath, replaying that terrible faux pas over and over again, and cringing a little more each time.

“D'oh,” he muttered finally, leaning forward and putting his head in his hands.

“Problems?” a voice asked suddenly.

Looking over at the door, he saw that Emily Stone was watching him.

“Nothing I can't handle,” he replied, hauling himself up and heading over to her. “Definitely nothing in the grand scheme of things.”

“The police didn't say anything useful,” she continued, with tears in her eyes. “Just that they're doing their best to find Lizzie, that they're confident she'll show up soon, and that I'm still not allowed to break my curfew. They didn't tell me half the things you did, so it's pretty obvious they're trying to keep me in the dark.”

“Catherine Maloney from the care home promised to keep me up to date,” he replied, “so if there are any developments, we'll probably hear from her before the police get their asses moving.”

“I'm allowed to leave the house at 8am,” she told him. “I'm going to be out that door on the dot. I don't know where I'm going to go, but...” Pausing, she seemed to be on the verge of breaking down. “I just want to find her,” she sobbed finally. “I don't know where she is, but she must be so scared. I don't even know where to begin looking for her tomorrow, but I have to do something, I have to go and look in all the places she knows, maybe she'll show up. Can't you at least tell me where the care home is?”

He shook his head.

“Is it so far that she wouldn't be able to walk here?”

“I can't say anything about that,” he replied. “There are rules, I have to respect them.”

Watching as her sobbing intensified, Robert considered putting a hand on her shoulder, or even giving her a hug, but he wasn't quite sure whether either move would be appropriate.

“I'll make some tea,” he said finally, heading over to the counter on the other side of the kitchen. “It's late. We should both get some sleep.”

***

Opening his eyes suddenly in the dark bedroom, Robert realized he could hear something.

He waited, his heart pounding in his chest, as he listened to a faint rustling sound somewhere else in the house. Checking his phone, he found that he'd only been asleep for about forty minutes, and when he looked at the window he saw that there was still no light outside.

Sitting up, he waited, hoping that he might suddenly realize the sound was something normal, something he could explain. After a moment, telling himself that he had to face his fears, he got out of bed and made his way across the dark room. Pulling the door open, he leaned out onto the landing, and finally he realized what he was hearing.

Emily was sobbing in the main bedroom.

Relieved, but also a little saddened, he closed the door quietly and headed back to bed.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Twenty-four years ago

“They're arse-holes, is what they are,” Joyce muttered furiously, stomping across the kitchen with a cigarette in her mouth. “Bunch of penny-pinching, short-sighted, judgmental arse-holes!”

Turning to Emily, who was sitting terrified at the kitchen table, she fumed for a moment before taking another drag on her cigarette.

“Did you hear me?” she barked.

Emily nodded.

“What are they then?”

“They're...” The little girl paused.

“Come on, let's hear it!”

“They're...”

“Say the word!”

“Arse-holes,” Emily whispered, shuddering a little at the word. She'd always been taught at school and by her father not to use curse words, and she hated it when her mother launched into another of her angry tirades.

“Too bloody right,” Joyce continued. “I mean, so what if we added some spice to the story, eh? Is that a crime?” She took a long, slow drag from her cigarette and then breathed the smoke out slowly. “We should sue 'em, is what we should do. We should sue the papers, and that so-called Doctor Slocombe, and all the people on the telly, for calling us liars like that.” Grabbing the newspaper from the counter, she stared at it for a moment before holding it up so that Emily could see the headline:

FAKE! COLTREATH HAUNTING EXPOSED

One side of the front-page was filled with a photo of Emily and her mother, taken at the height of their claims.

“Listen to this,” Joyce continued, reading from the paper. “Britain's biggest ghost story was exposed as a hoax last night as researchers sensationally discovered that Joyce Stone had been coaching her daughter Emily to lie about claims the family house was haunted by a poltergeist.” She sighed. “Disgusting. Coaching you? I wasn't coaching you, I was just encouraging you to speak up.”

“You told me to say things that weren't true,” Emily pointed out.

“It was true in the beginning!”

“But not all the other stuff you made me say.”

“Now you're just splitting hairs,” Joyce snapped. “Bloody hell, they really won't just give us a break, will they?”

“We shouldn't have lied,” Emily whimpered.

“Don't you start!” Joyce snapped, fuming as she continued to read the paper, before finally setting it down. “I'm calling a lawyer this afternoon,” she said with a sigh. “Maybe we can get some money out of the bastards that way, eh?”

***

“My mum says your mum's a liar,” said Sally as she walked with Emily along the corridor at school. “She says you're a liar too.”

Ignoring her, Emily headed out into the playground, but Sally stuck with her.

“Did you really make all that stuff up? Why?”

“I don't know,” Emily replied, her voice so low she could barely even be heard. She'd hoped that she could get away from all the talk about ghosts, but being at school was just making things worse. Everyone knew what had happened.

“My mum says liars are going to burn in hell,” Sally continued, “so that means you're going to burn in hell. How does it feel to know that's going to happen to you? I wouldn't like it, not if it was me.”

Stopping by the swings, Emily turned to her.

“What's it like being a liar?” Sally asked.

“I'm not a liar.”

“Yes you are. Everyone says it.”

Emily opened her mouth to explain the truth, but at the last moment she held back. The whole thing had become far too complicated, and she knew there was no way she could get anyone to believe her.

“I'm going to play with Cerys and the others,” Sally added, “but they said you can't come, because you're a liar. You understand that, don't you? No-one wants to play with a liar.”

Emily paused, before nodding.

“It sucks,” Sally told her, turning and heading away.

Looking back across the playground, Emily saw that two of the dinner-ladies were standing by the door. They were watching her as they talked, and after a moment one of them waved for her to go and join them. Reluctantly, Emily made her way over, even though she knew she hadn't done anything wrong.

“You alright there?” one of them asked.

Emily nodded.

“Saw you and your mum in the papers again,” the other said. “Got caught telling fibs, did you?”

Emily paused, not really knowing how to reply.

“Didn't no-one ever tell you that lying's wrong?” the first dinner-lady asked. “I hope this'll be a lesson to you. If you start telling lies, people are always going to find out, and then what happens? No-one wants to be friends with a liar. It's a sign of bad character. Most people are raised better than that.”

“Can I stay inside for lunch?” Emily asked. “I just want to draw.”

“It's nice weather,” the first dinner-lady told her. “You're not allowed to be inside when it's nice weather. What's wrong with you, don't you want to play?”

“No-one wants to play with me.”

“Well they won't, will they, if you've got that attitude? Go on, go and be friendly.”

“But -”

“Won't do no good moaning to us. Go on, it's lovely out.”

Turning, Emily looked across the playground and saw that some of the others were watching her, and clearly laughing about everything that had happened.

“Get on with you,” the second dinner-lady told her. “Go and play.”

Making her way across the playground, Emily felt more and more that the other children were talking about her. As she got closer to them, she saw that Sally was being pushed forward by the others, as if she was the one who'd been delegated to say something.

“Sorry, Emily,” Sally said after a moment.

“It's okay,” Emily replied, walking straight past her.

By the time she reached the seats at the far end and sat down, she knew that no-one was going to want anything to do with her, and that she'd just have to wait until the end of lunch. Looking down, she started swinging her feet, but she could still hear people whispering all around her, and the whispers were getting louder and louder, until finally she had to stick her fingers in her ears to keep from hearing them.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Emily?”

Stopping at the bottom of the stairs, Robert looked around for a moment, but the house seemed silent. He checked his watch and saw that it was still only 7:50am, so he wandered through to the kitchen. At the back of his mind, he was worried that Emily might have broken her curfew and headed out during the night, but to his relief he found her sitting at the kitchen table, already wearing her coat as she waited another ten minutes.

“Don't even try to stop me,” she said firmly. “I'm going out there to find my daughter.”

“Where are you going to start?” he asked.

“Her school. Did you hear anything from the woman at the care home?”

He shook his head.

“That means she's been out all night,” she continued. “It was cold, it was down to eight degrees at one point. If she was out in that, she'd have been freezing.”

“I'm sure she wasn't out in it,” he replied.

“Then where was she?”

He opened his mouth to make a suggestion, before realizing that he had no idea. There wasn't a single possibility that would help calm Emily's nerves.

“Nine minutes to go,” she replied, checking her watch.

“Have you ever heard of Mary Meacham?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Mind if I make some coffee?” Heading to the counter, he switched the kettle on before taking his phone from his pocket. There were no missed calls from Jenna, so he brought up a browser and ran a quick search. “Twenty-four years ago,” he explained, “before everything went pear-shaped, I'd started to look into the history of this house, and of the area in general. I was hoping to work out whether the ghost might be a specific person, which – I guess – it has to be, doesn't it? Maybe someone who died here in tragic circumstances.”

“And?”

He turned to her. “These houses are fairly new, they're from the sixties or seventies. Before they were built, the land was part of a larger estate owned by the Meacham family. They were a very wealthy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but they fell on hard times and eventually they had to sell up.” Tapping the screen on his phone, he brought up a photo of a smiling woman. “You saw a face, didn't you? Back then, I mean. The photos were blurry, but you told me you saw a woman's face.”

She nodded.

“Was that part of the hoax, or did you really see the face?”

“I...” She paused. “I swear to God, I can't even remember anymore. Everything just seemed to have mixed together.”

“Mary Meacham was the daughter of the former landowner,” he replied. “One day, she vanished, and although her brother was suspected of involvement, no body was ever found. It seems her brother had some kind of problem in his head, and a few months later he was caught with another girl... Reading between the lines, it seems his family had him killed, but no trace was ever found of Mary. It's pretty clear that she was killed somewhere around here, and probably buried in the area too.”

“That's...” Emily paused. “Did that really happen right here?”

He nodded.

“That poor women,” she continued. “I had no idea...”

“She sounds like a good candidate for the ghost, then, doesn't she?”

“Do you have any more information about her?” Emily asked. “If we dig into the story, we might be able to work out why she's here and what she wants.”

“Take a look,” he replied, heading over and setting his phone in front of her, so she could see the photo. “Do you -”

“That's her,” she said quickly, with fear in her eyes.

“When you say -”

“It's her,” she said again, “I swear, I remember!”

He paused for a moment, watching her expression. “On a scale of one to ten -”

“Ten. I'm certain.” She stared at the phone for a moment longer, before looking up at him. “Who was she? What do you think she wants?”

Checking his watch, he saw that it was 8am. “Maybe we should talk about this later,” he replied. “If you're going to go and look for Lizzie, your curfew ended a few seconds ago.”

“Will you be here tonight?” she asked.

“I have a few things I need to do in town,” he replied, “some errands to run, some research. I'll come back at six, how does that sound? I can even bring something from that takeaway on the corner. You've got my number?”

“I'll call you if I find her,” she said, hurrying to the front door. “She's out there somewhere!”

“I know,” he muttered, watching as she hurried outside, “that's the part of this that doesn't make any sense.” Grabbing his phone, he brought up Douglas's number and waited for an answer. “It's me,” he said finally. “Listen, I think we need to settle this thing once and for all. Are you free tonight?”

***

“And you said you're a family friend?” the nurse asked as they made their way along the corridor.

“Kind of,” Robert replied. “It's been a long time since I saw Joyce. The truth is, we had a little disagreement the last time we talked. That's all in the past, of course. Emily said something about her not being well?”

“She has dementia,” the nurse replied, opening the door and leading him into the ward. “Her lucidity comes and goes in waves that last anywhere between a few minutes and a few hours. She's not as bad as some of our residents but she might not recognize you. Don't be upset if she acts as if you're not even here, she was quite foggy this morning at breakfast.”

“I just want a very quick word with her,” he explained. “Really, I just want to tell her something.”

“Huh,” the nurse said, stopping in the middle of the recreation room. “She's not here. I guess she must be in her room.”

***

“I'll leave you two to it,” the nurse said a few minutes later, pulling the door shut.

“Thanks,” Robert muttered, watching as Joyce stayed in her wheelchair on the other side of the room, staring out at the garden. The old woman hadn't looked over since he arrived, hadn't even given any indication that she knew someone was in the room with her.

Making his way past the bed, Robert headed to the window and stopped once he could see Joyce's face. He could tell immediately that the years had been harsh on her, and she looked much older than her sixty-four years. It was hard for him not to assume that guilt had eaten away at her, although he knew he was probably being a little melodramatic in that assumption. The most likely cause was all the cigarettes she'd smoked.

“Good morning,” he said finally, having waited for her to acknowledge him. “Long time, no see.”

Silence. Her chin was trembling slightly as she watched other residents in the garden.

“In normal circumstances,” he continued, “I'm sure you'd remember me. Given your current condition, however, I'm going to guess there's a chance you genuinely don't have a clue who I am.” Grabbing a wooden chair from nearby, he positioned it next to Joyce and then sat down. “Doctor Robert Slocombe. We met twenty-four years ago in... somewhat difficult circumstances.”

Joyce's eyes flickered for a moment, as if she remembered, but still she didn't turn to face him.

“I think the last time we talked,” he reminded her, “was on a rainy day when I came to your house and told you exactly what I thought of you. I probably said some very harsh things, but the truth is, I meant them then and I mean them now. I didn't come here today to apologize, I came to tell you that your daughter and granddaughter are in a great deal of trouble, and that I'm going to try to help them, and that it's plain to me that it's all your fault. Emily seems like a nice woman, so I imagine she's shielded you from understanding the true damage you caused. I don't think that's fair.”

Watching her face for a moment, he began to feel that her refusal to look at him was due more to anger than to a lack of awareness.

“I know you can hear me,” he told her, with a faint smile. “I know you remember who I am.”

He waited, but there was no reply.

“Lizzie's missing,” he continued. “I guess no-one told you about that yet. Again, they probably decided they didn't want to worry you. Crazy how people are protecting you, isn't it? So yeah, she's gone and no-one knows how to find her. She was taken to a care home, and she disappeared from their custody. Where she went, I don't have a clue. A more suggestible mind would immediately assume that something supernatural took place, but -”

He paused, thinking back to the moment when he saw something behind Lizzie's face, staring out through the little girl's hollow eyes. Then there had been the girl outside the bar, and the way her face had burned as she warned him to stay away.

“Then again,” he muttered, “we're all suggestible, aren't we? I've even managed to convince myself that I've seen things over the past few days. Sometimes there just seems to be the right atmosphere around.”

Waiting again, he started to think that he could see tears in Joyce's eyes.

“So Lizzie is officially missing,” he continued, “and whether she's alone or with some as-yet-unidentified individual, I'm sure you'll understand that her safety is of great concern to everyone, and that she's in danger. As I said before, I firmly believe that this is all your fault. It's your abysmal parenting, and your manipulation of events, that have rippled down through the years, ruining your family.”

Reaching into his pocket, he took out his phone.

“And then there's Emily,” he added. “Given the fact that she had one of the worst mothers in history, she's actually turned out remarkably well. It doesn't take long, though, to dig beneath the surface and find evidence of greater damage.”

Holding the phone up, he showed Joyce the photo he'd shown Emily earlier.

“I told Emily earlier that this was a woman who died on the site of the house. I told her a long story about how poor Mary Meacham disappeared, and I suggested that it might be her spirit that's haunting the house now. Emily immediately recognized this woman and told me that she remembered seeing her in her bedroom.” He paused for a moment, watching for a flicker of emotion in Joyce's eyes. “The only problem is,” he continued, “although the story about Mary is true, the photo was a trick. There's no photo of Mary Meacham. I wanted to test Emily.”

He turned the phone and looked at the image for a moment.

“This is a woman named Loretta Lynn. American country singer. I'm pretty sure Loretta Lynn isn't haunting that house or your family. For one thing, Loretta Lynn is alive and well. And yet...” He paused, staring at the photo. “And yet Emily swore blind this morning that this was the woman who was haunting her twenty-four years ago. I wanted to test her, to see how easily she could be prompted to believe certain things.” Sighing, he slipped the phone away. “It's clear to me now that her version of events can't be trusted. You really damaged her, do you realize that? She can't tell the difference between reality and fiction, between truth and lies.”

He waited for her to reply.

Still, Joyce didn't turn to him.

“That's really all I came to say,” he continued finally, getting to his feet. “I just thought you should know the truth about what a despicable, evil, cruel woman you've been, and about the serious damage you've caused not only to your daughter but also to her daughter. I know this might sound mean, but genuinely, I hope there is a hell, because someone like you deserves to burn there for the rest of eternity.”

Heading to the door, he pulled it open and then glanced back at the old woman.

“I'm going to do what I can to help them,” he added. “A friend of mine is coming tonight and we're going to make Emily face the truth once and for all. It'll be hard for her, but it's the right thing to do. Either that, or we'll prove that ghosts exist and this whole thing has a basis in reality after all, but...” He paused. “Somehow I don't think that's going to happen.”

Joyce Stone didn't react, didn't even flinch, as Robert left the room and pulled the door shut. Still sitting in her wheelchair and staring out at the garden, Joyce watched the calm scene, as a single tear rolled down her cheek.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“It's basically a kind of infra-red scanner,” Douglas explained as he plugged some leads into the box on Emily's kitchen table, “but it alternates its cycle to take into account other possible sources. The theory is that different radiation types might be breaking through from somewhere else. I mean, if any kind of doorway is opening, something must be coming through and if we have the right sensors, we can detect some kind of residue.”

“That's junk science,” Robert said, picking up another part of the device and examining it for a moment, before setting it back down. “You know that, right? It's a bunch of disparate elements held together by faith and hope, two things that are the enemy of academic study. In fact, it's precisely the kind of woolly thinking that I ran from screaming all those years ago. Seriously, I know it might be convincing when you're telling yourself this crap, but trust me, from the outside it's... Well, it's clearly bullshit.”

“You've been out of the field for twenty-odd years,” Douglas pointed out. “You have no idea -”

“What do you know about the Myrkia?” Robert asked suddenly, finally getting to the matter he'd been circling ever since Douglas had pulled up outside the house a few minutes earlier. He felt a little embarrassed bringing the subject up, but he knew Douglas still had his uses.

“It's some crackpot book written by an eighteenth century demonologist.”

“You've read it?”

“Parts of it. It's pretty impenetrable, full of vague, meandering claims. I think the idea behind it was that the author claimed to have done the whole thing through some form of automatic writing. This was long before Taine and people like that. The Myrkia is basically supposed to be a description of the world of the dead, isn't it? Almost like an atlas or an encyclopedia.” He paused for a moment. “Why?”

“I read it in college,” Robert replied, heading over to another workbench and picking up some print-outs, before setting them back down again and turning to Douglas. “It's a baffling text. The ravings of a madman, you might say.”

“Widely dismissed, I believe?”

Robert nodded.

“And extremely obscure.”

He nodded again.

“So why the sudden interest?”

“There's a part in it,” Robert continued, “about a wall.”

“There are parts in lots of books about walls.”

“Hear me out, Doug. There's a part in the book that describes a vast wall made up of the souls of the living. According to the author of the Myrkia, dead souls sometimes try to climb that wall and find a way to break through. There was even a scratchy little drawing showing eye holes and mouth holes on the wall, with the dead people looking through those holes so they could see into the land of the living, like...”

“Like they're in some schlocky old horror movie?”

“I remember reading about that wall a long time ago, back when I was still involved in this kind of thing. It's one of the few things that really stuck with me.”

“So?”

“So how many people in the world today do you think have read the Myrkia? How many do you think have even heard of it? Twenty? Thirty? It's not online, it's too obscure to even have a Wikipedia page. You sure as hell can't buy a copy. Hell, it's not even in the British Library.”

“Almost no-one has read that pile of crap,” Douglas replied. “I know you think I'm rather gullible, Rob, but even I wrote the Myrkia off a long time ago.”

“So how did Emily Stone describe that wall to me twenty-four years ago?”

“Come again?”

“The dead place she mentioned in the interviews I conducted... It sounded a lot like the world described in the Myrkia.”

Douglas paused. “I guess might be a few similarities, but nothing concrete, nothing a child with an overactive imagination couldn't come up with.”

“But she was so insistent,” Robert continued, “and she went into quite a lot of detail about it, more so than any other parts of the story. She described the land of the dead as being a full world, with different parts, different areas, different types of soul. That's straight out of the Myrkia.”

“And?” Douglas waited for a reply. “You're not actually thinking of taking her seriously again, are you?”

“No, of course not, but...”

“But?”

“Since all of this cropped up again,” he continued, “I've been taking another spin through the tapes, and I keep coming back to something that I noticed all those years ago. The way Emily talked about her first encounter with the spirit in this house is very different to the way she talked about all the other events. With the benefit of hindsight, I can absolutely tell that she's lying when it comes to 99% of the things she says, it's as clear as day. But when it comes to that first night, the very first encounter with the entity, there's a different tone in her voice, and the story just seems to fit together in some other way.”

“You think that part was real?”

“She said as much yesterday.”

“When she was trying to get you back on her side?”

“Even if that part wasn't real,” he continued, “maybe she at least thinks it's real. If you look at her heart-rate from the interviews, it was always characterized by brief, sudden spikes and troughs, whereas when she was talking about the first night, and about this dead place idea, her pulse was much more consistently elevated, as if... Something was different. In that little girl's mind, something else was going on during that first night, compared to everything else.”

“And she told you all this yesterday?”

“She said there was a germ of truth in it all. That something really happened, and her mother built the hoax on top of it all.”

“Sounds convenient.”

“Of course, she's hardly a reliable witness,” he admitted. “I've already managed to prove that today with the photo trick, but I guess it would be closed-minded of me to ignore the possibility that there might be some truth mixed in with everything else. At the very least, I should wait and see if she -”

Hearing a key in the front door, he looked through to the hallway. He checked his watch and saw that Emily was home with just a couple of minutes to spare before her curfew kicked in again.

“The lady herself,” Douglas muttered.

“Let me deal with her,” Robert whispered to him, “and whatever you do, don't mention anything I've told you so far.”

“There's no sign of her,” Emily called out as she hurried through from the hallway. “I need you to tell me where this care home is, so I can -”

Stopping as soon as she saw Douglas and the machine on the table, she froze for a moment before turning to Robert.

“It's time to get answers once and for all,” he told her. “If this house is really haunted, we're going to find out tonight. If it's not... Well, we'll find that out instead.”

***

“And one here,” Douglas said a short while later, as he taped a sensor to the back of Emily's neck. “Sorry if they're a little cold.”

“It's fine,” she replied, staring at the machine. “What exactly does this do, again?”

“Lots of things,” he explained with a faint smile as he headed to the table and gathered up some papers. “I call it my all-in-one ghost detector. Patent pending. There's more tech packed into this unit than you'd get in most full-sized laboratories. We can -”

Hearing a bump upstairs, he looked at the ceiling.

“What's Doctor Slocombe doing up there?” Emily asked.

“God knows,” Douglas muttered, turning to her. “Banging about like a ghost, from the sound of things. He's not really expecting anything to happen tonight.”

“But you are?”

“I keep a more open mind,” he replied.

“I saw the woman in the photo,” Emily continued earnestly. “It's her, it's the woman I saw when I was younger.”

“It is, huh?” Douglas said, with a sad smile. “Well, I'm sure you really believe that.” As he heard Robert hurrying downstairs, he made some more adjustments to the machine. “Our personal beliefs don't matter too much,” he continued. “We need to put them aside and focus on the science. Doctor Slocombe and I might be coming at this from two different directions, but we're converging on a common point. We both want to know the truth about what's been happening in this house. So far, the whole thing has been rather convoluted, don't you think?”

“And we have to find Lizzie,” Emily added. “That's all that matters.” She paused for a moment. “Actually, can I tell you something? I think you should know, but I don't want Doctor Slocombe to find out.”

“What is it?”

“Earlier -”

“I finished a sweep of the house,” Robert announced as he entered the room. “I'm pretty sure there's zero chance of a cat leaping out of a cupboard to give us all heart-attacks. I also made sure there's no chance of anyone hiding anywhere, and that includes Lizzie.”

“So what's the plan, exactly?” Emily asked, turning to him. “How are you going to get Mary Meacham to speak to us?”

Robert glanced at Douglas, and they shared an uncomfortable glance for a moment.

“What?” Emily continued. “Is there something you guys aren't telling me?”

“Not at all,” Robert continued. “We just need to be patient. This isn't like a seance, so we aren't going to be lowering the lights and inviting the spirits to join us. It's more a case of waiting to see if anything happens of its own accord.”

“How frequent have the unusual events been over the past few weeks?” Douglas asked, adjusting a dial on the front of the machine.

“Almost every night,” she replied. “Pretty regular.”

“Then hopefully we'll get something,” he muttered. “Your heart-rate's steady.”

“At least this time I don't have a thumb-tack in my shoe,” she told him.

“A what?” Robert asked, turning to her.

“Back when you interviewed me twenty-four years ago,” she continued, “my mother used to make me put a thumb-tack in my shoe. At certain points, she'd give me a little signal and I'd have to push my foot down on the pin. It was one of the ways she wanted to make me seem genuinely upset, and it used to cause those spikes in my heart-rate that you noticed.” She paused. “I still have a few little scars down there.”

“Huh,” he replied, “well... That's lovely, isn't it? And this woman never won a single prize for her outstanding parenting skills?”

“You should have seen us when we were faking those photos,” she added. “I used to have to throw myself through the air like a doll. This was in the day before digital cameras, so we'd just use up a roll of film and hope for the best. We got them developed at Boots. She used to go on and on about the cost. Sometimes a whole roll would be a dud, and she'd...”

Robert waited for her to continue. “And she'd what?” he asked finally.

She shook her head.

“Did she hit you?”

“No, of course not.” She paused. “She'd sulk. For hours, sometimes a couple of days. It was like, if I didn't lie well enough, she thought I was trying to sabotage her plans.”

“So you'd try harder the next time?”

She nodded.

“Sounds like a fun childhood,” Robert muttered. “Thankfully it's much cheaper for people to fake a haunting these days. All you need is Photoshop or Gimp, a little imagination, and the balls to lie to the world.”

“Are we ready?” Douglas asked.

“You realize this is it, don't you?” Robert continued, turning to Emily. “Tonight's the night, it's put-up or shut-up time, we're drawing a line under the whole goddamn thing. If there's any kind of paranormal activity here, anything at all, we will get some kind of proof.”

“I just want my daughter back,” she told him. “I don't care about the rest of it, not now. I don't even care if you believe me, and I sure as hell don't want to be in any newspapers. I just have to find Lizzie.”

“Then we'll begin,” Douglas said, flicking a switch on the front of the machine before turning to Emily. “Doctor Slocombe and I will wait out in the car, to avoid interfering with anything, but you have the earpiece and the microphone, Emily, so we'll be in constant contact. Just go about your usual routine and hopefully we'll catch something on one of the machines.”

“But -” Looking around the room, she seemed lost for a moment.

“Something wrong?” Robert asked.

“It's just -” She turned to him. “I don't know what to do without Lizzie around. I usually spend my evenings looking after her, talking to her, watching things with her, helping her do her homework. I know that sounds boring, like I don't have a life, but it's been a long time since I just...”

Her voice trailed off.

“Do your best,” Robert replied, before turning to Douglas. “Come on. We should get started.”

***

“This is bullshit,” Robert muttered, as he and Douglas sat in the dark car and watched the house from a distance. “I'm going to the corner shop for cigarettes. You coming?”

“I'm pretty sure someone should stay here in case she needs us,” Douglas replied.

“Whatever.”

As Robert climbed out of the car and slammed the door shut, Douglas grabbed the microphone and switched it on.

“Just checking in,” he said. “How are things going in there, Emily?”

“I'm fine,” she replied. “Nothing's happened. How are you guys doing?”

“We're having a whale of a time,” he told her, watching as Robert made his way along the dark street. “Doctor Slocombe's just stepped out for some fresh air, so I'm sitting here alone.”

“So he can't hear me right now?”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing, it's just...” She paused, as the line buzzed for a moment. “I feel like I need to tell you something, but you can't tell him. He'd probably get really angry and call the whole thing off.” Another pause. “I lied to Doctor Slocombe earlier today.”

“About what?”

“It's stupid, but he showed me this photo of some woman named Mary. He said he thought she was the woman who's haunting this house, and I told him I recognized her. I told him she was the woman I saw when I was a kid, I really laid it on thick.”

Douglas waited for her to continue. “And... what was the lie?”

“She wasn't the woman,” she continued. “I've never seen the woman in that photo in my life, and she definitely wasn't the woman I saw when I was younger. I just panicked. I figured that if I told him I hadn't seen her, he'd think the whole thing was another hoax. I know I shouldn't have lied, but...” She paused again. “Do you think I should tell him the truth?”

“I think...” Staring at the house for a moment, he tried to imagine how Robert would react. “Keep it to yourself for now. It's good that you told me, though. It might be relevant at some point. There's probably -”

He stopped as he saw a shadow moving across one of the dark upstairs windows in the house.

“Are you upstairs?” he asked, as a shiver passed up his spine.

“I'm in the front room,” she replied. “I know I should go to bed, but I'm just sitting here, reading. I'll go soon.”

“Uh-huh,” he muttered, opening one of the laptops and bringing up the feed from the cameras. Sure enough, they showed Emily sitting on the sofa with a book on her lap. Glancing at the house again, he saw that there was no longer a shadow in the upstairs window, but he was certain he'd seen something a moment ago and he knew there was no way Emily could have got down to the sofa so quickly.

“Do you think he'd be mad if he found out I lied again?” Emily asked.

“He might well be,” Douglas replied, bringing up the feeds from the upstairs cameras. He flicked from one to the next, but there was no sign of movement. “Have you heard anything in the last few minutes?”

“No. Why?”

He checked the readouts from the heart-monitor and saw that everything seemed stable.

“Should I have heard something?” she asked.

“I'm not -” He turned as Robert opened the car door and climbed back in with a Spar bag. “I'm not sure,” he added. “Just let us know if anything pops up.”

“You sound worried,” Emily replied. “What's wrong?”

“Yeah, Doug, what's wrong?” Robert asked with a faint smile. “Did something spook her? I swear I swept for cats -”

“It's nothing,” Douglas said firmly. “I'll be in touch in an hour, Emily, unless you need anything in the meantime.”

“What?” Robert continued, as he watched Douglas setting the microphone down. “Come on, I know you. I know when you've got a bug in your ass.”

“I'm just being jumpy,” he replied, keeping his eyes fixed on the house. “It's probably nothing.”

***

Sitting alone on the sofa, Emily tried to focus on the book she was reading. After a moment, however, she looked up at the ceiling, as if she expected to hear a noise.

Nothing.

***

“I've changed my mind,” Robert muttered a few minutes later. “I don't think she's lying, not anymore. I think she genuinely believes this stuff. That's how tragically messed-up she is. You should have heard her earlier, she swore that the photo I showed her was the same face she saw when she was younger.”

Douglas opened his mouth to argue with him, before holding back at the last minute.

“I think...” Robert paused for a moment, before reaching into the plastic bag and pulling out some sandwiches. “I think we shouldn't put too much faith in anything she says. Hell, the other night she and her daughter even got into my head.”

“In what way?”

“I just thought I saw...” He paused for a moment. “The human brain is a remarkable thing,” he continued finally. “Whenever there are gaps in our sensory perception, we're able to smooth over those gaps. Sometimes, however, the brain goes wrong and adds assumptions that turn out to be wrong. They might seem real at the time, but there's absolutely nothing in them, even though they feel so real, it's almost as if you can reach out and touch them.”

“What happened when you spoke to Lizzie Stone?” Douglas asked. “I can tell something unnerved you.”

“It was nothing.”

“Clearly it was something.”

“No, it was just...” For a moment, he thought back to the sight of the little girl's empty eyes, and the other face peering through from what had seemed to be another world. “It was a brief moment of crossed wires in my head,” he continued finally. “No-one's immune to that sort of thing.”

“I sense a softening of your stance.”

“No, I just -” Stopping suddenly, he stared at the house.

“What?” Douglas asked, following his glance but seeing nothing, not even in the upstairs windows.

“I thought -” He paused, before forcing a smile. “It was nothing. Trick of the light. I seriously doubt ghosts hang around by windows for the benefit of anyone who might be watching.” Grabbing his phone, he checked the screen yet again. “Have you heard from Jenna? She hasn't replied to my last couple of messages.”

“Isn't she on holiday?”

Robert paused, before sighing. “I guess I forgot about -”

“Did you hear that?” Emily's voice asked suddenly, coming over loud and clear via the main laptop.

“Hear what?” Douglas asked, immediately checking all the camera views.

“There's something up there,” she replied, with obvious fear in her voice. “Are you going to come back inside?”

“No,” Robert whispered. “She has to be alone.”

“Negative,” Douglas told her, watching as one of the cameras showed Emily cautiously making her way to the foot of the stairs. “We can see you, though. The cameras in the bedrooms show nothing out of the ordinary, and the infra-red equipment is the same. There are no -”

He stopped as a faint thud could be heard from the speaker.

“Did you hear that?” Emily asked.

“We heard something,” Douglas told her. “Are you okay to go up and take a look?”

“Are you sure you can't see anything?”

Robert took a moment to check each of the upstairs cameras. “There's nothing showing,” he muttered. “It's as quiet as a mouse as far as the equipment is concerned.” He brought up one of the downstairs cameras and saw Lizzie standing in the hallway, with an expression of pure fear on her face. “Just be brave,” he added.

“Should I go up?” she asked.

“Please,” Douglas replied. “If this thing is localized around you and Lizzie, we need to see if we can draw it out.”

“Assuming it hasn't noticed all the cameras,” Robert muttered, “and that it hasn't been listening in the whole time.”

They sat in silence for a moment and watched as Emily slowly made her way up to the landing. She looked around, as if she was expecting something to leap out at her at any moment.

“Go to the child's room,” Douglas told her. “That's where everything has been focused so far.”

“I don't hear any more sounds,” she replied, heading along to the door at the far end of the landing. Reaching out, she turned the handle and started to push the door open.

“Her heart-rate's up,” Robert muttered, checking the monitor. “Are we sure she didn't slip more thumb-tacks into her shoes?”

“There's still nothing on any of the feeds,” Douglas replied, switching to the camera in Lizzie's bedroom as it showed Emily stepping inside. “Everything looks normal.”

“I'm sure the noise came from in here,” she said, sounding tense. “This is how it always starts.”

“And what usually happens next?” Robert asked.

“Lizzie's usually here,” she pointed out.

“The child's absence might affect things,” Douglas said, turning to Robert. “We don't know what acts as the catalyst for this thing, but children do seem to be -”

“Jesus!” Robert replied, leaning closer to the screen.

Turning, Douglas saw that a dark figure was standing in the doorway, right behind Emily and watching as she stepped further into the room.

“What the hell is -”

Before he could finish, the camera cut to black, as did all the other views.

“Emily?” Robert asked, grabbing the microphone. “What do you see?” He waited, before turning to Douglas. “It's dead. None of the equipment inside the damn place is working.”

“Should we go in?” Douglas asked, turning to look out at the dark house.

“Maybe we should wait and see what she's got planned,” Robert replied. “She's probably counting on us going in there.”

“You still think she's staging the whole thing?”

“I think we shouldn't underestimate how complicated things are in her head right now. She genuinely believed she saw that woman in that photo and -”

“She was lying about that,” Douglas replied, still watching the house. “She admitted it earlier, when you weren't listening. She only said she recognized the woman because she was worried you'd lose interest and leave.”

“Are you serious?” Robert asked.

“It's what she told me. Or do you think she's trying to play us off against each other?”

“Well, then -” Robert paused for a moment, before opening the door and climbing out of the car.

“Are we going in?” Douglas called after him, as he watched Robert hurrying toward the house. “Okay,” he muttered, opening the door on his side, “I guess we're going in.”

***

“Emily!” Robert shouted as he hurried into the hallway and looked up the stairs. “Emily, are you -”

Before he could finish, he heard voices shouting in the distance. Racing upstairs, he looked along toward the far end of the landing and realized that flickering blue light was blasting out from beneath one of the closed doors.

“Rob!” Douglas shouted from down in the hallway. “Where are you?”

“She's up here!” he called out, before hurrying to the door and trying to open it, only to feel searing pain as soon as he touched the handle. Struggling for a moment to pull his hand away, he finally ripped an entire layer of skin from his palm and fingers, and as he held his bloodied hand up to take a look, he realized that the handle had been ice cold. Looking down, he saw patches of his skin stuck fast to the metal.

“What the hell is that light?” Douglas asked as he reached him, before spotting the damage to his hand. “What happened to you?” He reached toward the handle.

“No!” Robert shouted, pulling him back just in time. “Don't touch it!”

“Emily!” Douglas called out, banging on the door but immediately pulling back. “The damn thing's almost frozen!” he said, his eyes filled with shock.

From inside the child's bedroom, a voice could be heard shouting, and there was the sound of something slowly cracking.

“We have to get in there,” Robert muttered, taking a step back and sizing up the door, ready to try knocking it down.

“Emily!” Douglas shouted. “Can you hear me?”

“I'm going for it,” Robert told him, before slamming against the door with his shoulder, hard enough to make the wood buckle but not quite hard enough to force the whole thing open. Taking a step back, he steadied himself and then tried again, this time knocking one of the panels away. A blast of bright blue light burst through, forcing him back, and this time the sound of howling wind could be heard.

“What's going on in there?” Douglas asked, too shocked to move.

“Emily?” Robert called out, holding up a hand to shield his face as he stepped toward the broken door. “Emily, are you -”

“Help me!” Lizzie suddenly screamed, appearing at the door's broken panel and trying to reach through.

“What the hell?” Robert shouted, grabbing the little girl's hand and holding on tight, even though her skin was almost too cold to touch. “Lizzie, what are you doing in there?”

“It's got her!” she told him, with frozen tears in her eyes. “Help!”

Ignoring the pain in his bloodied right hand, Robert grabbed another of the door's panels and forced it away, finally creating a hole that was big enough for him to haul Lizzie through. As she dropped down onto the carpet, he knelt for a moment and rolled her over, finding that although she was almost frozen, he could feel her heart pounding as soon as he put two fingers against the side of her neck.

“Mummy's in there,” she whispered, looking back at the door.

“I'll find her,” he replied, getting to his feet and looking through the broken panels. Inside the room, a vast haze of blue light seemed to be bursting from a hole in the far wall, and he could just about hear a faint scream coming from inside. A moment later, he saw a faint silhouette on the floor, and he realized that Emily was down there, with her legs apparently partway into the hole in the wall.

“They're going to take her!” Lizzie shouted, as Douglas brought a duvet from the other bedroom and placed it around her shoulders.

“Hang on,” Robert replied, taking off his jacket and wrapping the fabric around his hand, before reaching through the broken door and fumbling for the handle on the other side. After struggling for a moment, he finally managed to get the door open. Stumbling into the room, he dropped his jacket as he stepped forward, and he immediately felt a blast of ice-cold air forcing him back.

“Mummy!” Lizzie shouted from the landing.

“No, wait!” Douglas hissed, holding her back.

Grabbing hold of the bed, Robert pulled himself forward. The air all around seemed to be shivering with the intensity of the blast coming from the far side, but he kept going, fighting every inch of the way until finally he reached Emily and was able to grab her hands. He shouted at her, telling her to follow, but he couldn't even hear his own voice above the immensely loud cracking sound coming from the far wall. Pulling as hard as he could manage, he was able to drag her away from the blinding light, but he stopped suddenly as he realized he could see another hand holding Emily's leg, trying to pull her back the other way.

“What the hell is that thing?” he whispered.

For a moment, he forgot all about Emily. Crawling past her, he took a closer look at the rotting, partially-decayed hand that was holding the woman's leg. After a moment, he realized he could see something beyond the arm too, as if the light was a door to another world. On the far side, there seemed to be a vast space filled with -

“Robert!” a voice called from over his shoulder.

Turning, he was just about able to make out the sight of Douglas at the door, reaching toward him.

Adjusting his grip on Emily's hands, Robert began to pull again, and this time he saw that the other hand was losing its grip. After a moment, he managed to get Emily all the way to the door and then out onto the landing, before reaching up and pulling the battered door shut.

“Mummy!” Lizzie shouted, falling onto Emily and wrapping her arms around her.

“What the hell is that thing?” Douglas asked, looking toward the door as the light started to fade.

“I saw it,” Robert stammered, as he saw Emily opening her eyes. “I swear to God, I looked right into it. I saw a whole other world through there.”

“What did you do?” Emily whispered, shivering as she began to sit up.

“It's okay,” Douglas told her, “you're -”

“Let me back in there!” she shouted, lunging past him and reaching for the door, before he pulled her back.

“Are you insane?” he asked, forcing her down to keep her from going into the room again. “Whatever's in there, it almost had you!”

“We made a deal!” she screamed, reaching toward the door as the light from the other side started to fade. “No! Come back! It's not my fault!”

“I'm going back in,” Robert said suddenly, hurrying to the door. “I have to see.” He pushed his way back into the room, but it was too late: the light had already dwindled away, and he found himself standing in darkness.

“What's not your fault?” Douglas asked, still holding Emily back. “Come on, talk to me!”

“We had a deal!” she shouted, with tears running down her face as the blue light finally dwindled away. “Come back!”

“What deal”? Robert asked, turning to her. “Emily, what are you talking about? What was that thing?”

“She wanted me!” she replied, her voice filled with anger. “Not Lizzie, she didn't care about Lizzie, she was only using her to get to me! We made a deal! She gave Lizzie back to me, and then I was supposed to let her come through to this world!”

“What is it?” Robert continued, stepping toward her.

“You don't understand, I just -”

“What is it?” he shouted. “For God's sake, just tell me!”

“Calm down,” Douglas hissed. “Robert, seriously. This can wait.”

“But Lizzie...” Turning, Robert saw the terrified expression on Lizzie's face. “Where the hell did you come from?” he asked her.

“The woman took her,” Emily explained, her voice trembling with fear. “She agreed to let her come back, but only if I let her take me in return and use me as her way through. I was willing to do that to save Lizzie, and you made me break my side of the deal! Do you know what that means? It means she'll come back and try again!” Lunging at Robert, she knocked him back against the wall. “Why did you have to interfere?”

“You were being pulled into that thing!” he spluttered. “You were up to your knees in whatever the hell it was!”

“I was willing to do that!” she shouted, before hearing a faint beeping sound from her leg. Looking down, she saw that her ankle-monitor was flashing.

“Why's it doing that?” Douglas asked. “Did you try to take it off?”

“No, but...” She paused. “My feet went through to the other side for a couple of minutes. It must have triggered the alarm, the police must have thought I'd left the house.” She turned to Robert. “Technically I did leave the house. Now do you believe me?”

“I...” He nodded, before looking toward the stairs as he realized there were police sirens approaching.

“That's them,” Emily continued. “They think I broke the terms of my release. They're going to take me away, and they'll never let me see Lizzie again. You have to help us!”

“This is insane,” Douglas muttered, sitting back. “It's way beyond anything I've ever experienced before.”

“Please,” Emily hissed, grabbing Robert's arm as the sirens came closer. “You have to help me!”

He stared at her for a moment, his mind racing as he tried to work out exactly what was happening.

“Please,” Lizzie whispered, still hugging her mother tight. The ice in her eyes had begun to melt, and finally tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“If you believe me,” Emily continued, “if you believe any of this, you can't let them take me away. Not now.”

He paused for a moment, before finally making a decision. “Wait here.” Turning, he hurried to the stairs and made his way down to the kitchen. As he heard a car pulling up outside and saw flashing blue lights at the window, he grabbed Douglas's toolbox and carried it back upstairs, before setting it down next to Emily.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I'm doing what you wanted,” he muttered, opening the box and pulling out a pair of industrial-grade shears. Slipping one of the blades inside the strap of Emily's ankle-monitor, he began to cut the device loose, finally managing to pull it away.

“You believe us?” Emily whispered.

“I believe you.”

A moment later, there was a loud knock on the front door.

“Then you have to help us,” Emily told him, as she pulled Lizzie tighter. “They'll take her away!”

“Stay here,” he replied, “and shut the hell up, all of you.”

Taking the broken ankle-monitor, he ran downstairs and hurried to the front door. On the other side of the frosted glass, two dark figures were bathed in the police car's flashing blue light. He took a moment to compose himself, frantically trying to work out what he was going to say, before pulling the door open.

“What the hell took you so long?” he shouted.

“Where's Emily Stone?” one of the officers asked, pushing past him and entering the hallway as the radio on his chest crackled into life.

“I think she went to the bus station,” Robert told him.

“We have to search the house first,” the other officer said.

“Didn't you hear me?” Robert asked, holding the ankle-monitor up for them to see. “She has her daughter with her! I tried to stop her, but she broke this off and took Lizzie to the bus station in town. I don't know where they're going, but if you don't get there soon, they'll leave! Shes' desperate, she might hurt the child!”

“Who are you?” the first officer asked.

“Doctor Robert Slocombe,” he replied, fumbling in his pocket before pulling out his wallet and holding up his university ID badge for them to see. “I had a hunch that Emily would be here, and I was right. I don't know how, but she's got her daughter, the girl who went missing from the care home. She's going to take her away, and she seemed suicidal.”

The officers glanced at each other, as if they weren't sure whether to believe him.

“She said it was hopeless,” Robert continued. “She said if they couldn't be together in this life, she'd take Lizzie away and do something to make sure they were together in the next. That's all I know, but please, you have to find her before she hurts her daughter.”

“How long ago did they leave?” the first officer asked.

“Just a few minutes ago.”

“And you're sure they were headed to the bus station?”

“I'm certain. Please, you have to find them before they get away. I think Emily's planning to do something to both of them.”

The officer paused for a moment, before turning to his colleague. “We'd better get there fast.”

“I'm calling back-up,” the other officer said, as they both headed to the door. “This is unit five, we need assistance at Coltreath bus station.”

“Stay here,” the first officer told Robert, grabbing the ankle-monitor from his hands. “Someone will be here to take a statement from you.”

“Just find them!” he shouted, hurrying to the door and watching as the officers made their way to their car. Nearby, neighbors had begun to emerge from nearby houses, watching the scene with open-mouthed shock. “Please!” he called out to the departing officers. “You have to find Emily Stone and her daughter before it's too late.”

As soon as the police car pulled away, he slammed the door shut and hurried back up to the landing, where Emily was still holding Lizzie tight and Douglas was sitting in absolute shock.

“We have to get moving fast,” Robert told them. “Doug, bring your car around to the back, we don't want the neighbors seeing us leave.”

“But -”

“Now!” he shouted.

As Douglas stumbled to the stairs and hurried down, Robert turned to Emily.

“It's okay,” he stammered. “I'm going to help you.”

“You should have let me do it,” she replied bitterly. “It would have been over by now!”

“There are other ways,” he told her, reaching down to take her hand and help her up. “We need to study whatever's happening to you.”

“It's more important to end it,” she pointed out, “and then to -” Letting out a gasp of pain as soon as she tried to put any weight on her ankle, she stumbled back and almost fell.

“I've got you,” Robert replied, grabbing her arm and holding her up. “Can you walk?”

“I think it's twisted,” she told him, starting to slowly limp forward. “Maybe I can -”

“You're too slow,” he continued, putting an arm around her waist and then picking her up. “Lizzie, go on ahead and open the back door.”

As the little girl hurried down the stairs, Robert began to carry Emily after her.

“You should have left it all alone,” she hissed at him. “Lizzie would have been safe by now. Instead, that thing's going to keep coming after us.”

“It's okay,” he replied, carrying her down to the hallway and then through to the kitchen. “I'm going to make sure you're both safe.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Twenty-four years ago

“That goddamn, lying, crooked bitch!” he shouted, turning and throwing his empty whiskey glass across the flat until it smashed against the far wall. “I should go back there right now and wring her neck!”

“Calm down,” Jenna replied, hurrying over to him and grabbing him by the shoulders. “Robert, I'm serious, you need to calm down right now, okay? You're going to hurt yourself if you keep this up!”

“What the hell do you know?” he asked, pulling away and heading over to the table, where he grabbed another glass and poured himself some more whiskey. “You have no idea how the fuck I feel.” He downed the whiskey in one go and immediately poured another. “It's the kid too, they're as bad as each other. I hope Joyce and Emily Stone rot in hell for all the lies they told.”

“You don't mean that,” she told him. “You're angry, you -”

“You bet I'm angry,” he snapped, knocking back another whiskey. “Want some of this?”

She watched as he refilled his glass, although his hands were shaking slightly and it was clear that he was way past the point where he might be persuaded to slow down.

“Rob,” she said after a moment, stepping closer, “I understand why you're angry -”

“They humiliated me,” he muttered, drinking another shot before dropping the glass and picking up the bottle, apparently preferring to drink direct instead. “They let me go public with all of this, they let me put my reputation on the line, and for what? Just so they could pocket some money from the papers? What kind of person thinks like that? What kind of person lives like that?”

“I guess they were desperate.”

“That stupid fucking whore -”

“Hey!”

He turned to her.

“Don't say things like that!” she continued. “For God's sake, Rob, I know you're angry, but try to keep hold of yourself, okay? Don't go around calling people whores!”

“They're both dumb fucks,” he muttered, taking a swig of whiskey. “The mother's a dirty liar, and Emily's an easily-led idiot who -”

“She's twelve years old, for God's sake!”

“I knew better when I was twelve,” he continued. “Being twelve doesn't mean you can lie with impunity. She's as bad as her mother. Did you know better? Come on, of course you did! Everyone does!”

She stared at him for a moment, trying to work out what she could say that might bring him back out of his anger. Finally, she turned and headed to the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked dourly.

“Back to my place.”

“It's late. There are no buses.”

“I'll walk.”

“Stay.”

“You're letting this change you,” she continued, close to tears. “You're feeling so sorry for yourself right now, aren't you?”

Sighing, he turned and saw that she was already slipping into her coat.

“Hey,” he said, stumbling toward her with the almost-empty bottle of whiskey in his right hand, “don't go. I'm pissed off, that's all. You can understand why I might be a little peeved, can't you?”

“This isn't the way to show it,” she muttered, buttoning the front of her coat. “Stumbling around, drunk out of your mind, shouting obscenities about a child -”

“When did you become such a prude?” he asked.

“You think you're such a big man, don't you?” she continued. “Strutting about, shouting fuck this and bullshit that, and swearing all over the place. If that's how you want to be, fine, but don't expect me to stick around and listen.” She grabbed her bag and turned to open the door. “I'll call you in a few days.”

“No!” Pushing the door shut, he stepped closer. “Come on, Jenna, don't be like this. Stay tonight.” Reaching out, he put a hand on the side of her face, but she quickly pushed him away. “Come on, baby...”

“Don't call me baby,” she said firmly. “I don't want to be around you when you're like this.”

“You have to understand,” he replied. “I was so close to getting proof. I thought I'd finally cracked it! I mean, that's the whole point of the work we do, isn't it? Getting proof?”

She shook her head.

“It's not?” he asked. “Then what, I ask you, is the point? Because I've been laboring under the misapprehension that as scientists and academics, we need to find proof so we can present these things to the world.”

“The point is knowing in here,” she replied, tapping her chest. “Knowing deep down, in your heart, that these kinds of things are real and worth pursuing. You don't need proof for that. Proof is for academic papers and conferences, proof is for other people. Proof comes later. For you, for each of us, we just need to start by knowing in our souls that what we're searching for is really out there. And that hasn't changed. Joyce and Emily Stone can't take that belief away from us.”

She waited for him to reply.

“Can it?” she asked finally.

“I don't know,” he muttered. “There comes a point when you need proof or...” His voice trailed off.

“Or you don't believe in it anymore?” she replied, with a hint of tears in her eyes. “Are you really going to let this hoax strip you of something so important?”

“Maybe it's all just bullshit,” he pointed out, slurring his words a little. “Ghosts, spirits, other worlds... Maybe it's all just childish bullshit, and maybe we should grow the fuck up. I mean, if there's been no proof found in all of human history, no real, absolute, certain proof, then maybe that tells us something. Maybe it tells us that there's nothing out there.”

“There you go again,” she replied, pulling the door open despite his attempt to keep it shut. “Proof is important, but it's not the only thing. You need to believe, too.”

“Stay,” he muttered, as she hurried out and headed along the hallway. “Hey!” he called after her. “Stay tonight!”

He waited, until he heard her heading out the door and into the stairwell.

“Tomorrow, then,” he continued, pushing the door shut and stumbling back across his dimly-lit flat. Swaying, he almost fell sideways a couple of times before reaching the window just in time to see Jenna heading out onto the pavement below and hurrying away.

He sighed, watching her until she was out of sight.

“Fuck,” he muttered, taking another swig of whiskey. With the bottle finished, he held it up for a moment and examined the label, before stumbling toward the kitchen. As he reached the middle of the room, however, he turned and threw the bottle, hitting the window and smashing the glass. “Fuck!” he shouted. “Goddamn lying bitches!”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Today

Pulling into the parking spot just after 4am, Doctor Robert Slocombe turned the engine off and looked back to see that Emily and Lizzie were fast asleep on the back seat, with their arms around one another.

***

“Hey,” Douglas said, catching up to him in the all-night restaurant as they waited for their food to be ready. “Where are they?”

“Sleeping in the car,” he replied wearily. “I didn't want to wake them, so I left the heating on and bought some extra burgers. I figure they'll be hungry soon.”

“Did they say much?” Douglas asked.

He shook his head.

“And are you sure this is wise, Rob? I mean, you lied to the police, and Emily's effectively on the run. Plus, you have a duty to tell them if Lizzie's -”

“Keep your voice down,” Robert whispered, as the woman behind the counter brought their orders over, including the Happy Meal he'd ordered for Lizzie. Grabbing his tray, he led Douglas over to a table by the window. “No, I don't know if this is wise. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, all I know is that the police would separate them and then Lizzie would probably go missing again and Emily would end up in a cell or on a psych ward. Whatever's going on, that wouldn't be a happy ending, would it? At least this way, we can help them.”

“Help them?” Douglas smiled. “In the old days, you'd be more concerned with studying them, not helping them.”

“That's what I meant,” he replied, biting into his burger. “Same thing,” he added with his mouth full.

“And how exactly do you propose to help them?”

“By working out what the hell's going on,” he continued. “I don't know, but it seems reasonable to assume that whatever's after Emily, it won't give up. I think it's also reasonable to assume that it's not tied specifically to the house, so we don't need to be there. We'll get them to the office and then we'll work out what the hell we're going to do next.”

“And you believe it all?”

Robert paused.

“Really?” Douglas added. “Are you back on the team now?”

“I can't deny what I saw tonight,” he replied. “I know the cameras cut out, but I'm sure we got some kind of reading on the sensors, and I saw it with my own eyes. We both did.”

“And what exactly was it?” Douglas asked. “Where did Lizzie come from? One moment she's missing and no-one knows where the hell she is, and then she shows up out of nowhere, in her bedroom.”

“From what Emily said, it sounds like she was taken to some other place and then released again, most likely through that crack or fracture or whatever the hell was in the room. It was like a door to another world.” He paused for a moment. “I saw it, Doug. I saw through it, something was on the other side, I was so close. There was... It was almost as if there was a whole other world through there. I have to find out what it means.”

“And how much is that worth to you?” Douglas asked. “What are you willing to sacrifice?”

“For the chance to see what's on the other side?” He paused again. “This scares me a little, but I don't think there's anything I wouldn't give.”

“Have you asked Lizzie yet?”

“I haven't had a chance. The poor kid's exhausted. I'm worried about how all of this is going to affect her.”

“You? Worried about a little girl?” Douglas smiled. “Jesus Christ, it's almost like the old Rob Slocombe has suddenly come back.”

“Don't get melodramatic,” Robert replied as he finished his burger and grabbed the rest of the food. “Come on, we need to get going. The sooner we can get them back to the office, the sooner we can get started.”

“And what's the plan?”

“There's no plan yet, but...” He paused for a moment. “I guess the first thing we need to do is to find out where the hell Lizzie Stone was between leaving the care home and turning up tonight.”

***

“It's okay,” Robert said a few hours later, as he sat opposite Lizzie and Emily, “there's no reason to be scared. I just need you to tell me everything you remember.”

He waited, but Lizzie simply stared at him.

“Do you remember anything?” he added. “You were gone for twenty-four hours, Lizzie. Is it all just a blur?”

After a moment, Lizzie looked up at her mother.

“Tell him what you remember,” Emily replied, with a faint smile. “It's okay.”

Turning back to Robert, Lizzie paused for a moment. “The woman came and got me,” she said finally, her voice faltering a little. “She came to the place I was staying and she grabbed me. She broken the door down and she pulled me into the light and through to the other side.”

“The other side of what?” he asked, glancing at the heart-rate monitor, which showed a slow but steady increase in Lizzie's pulse.

“The other side of the...” She paused. “She held onto me. We were high up, on the side of a wall, but the wall wasn't made out of bricks.”

“What was it made of?” Robert asked.

She stared at him for a moment. “It looked like... The insides of lots of faces, all sewn together.”

Robert looked over at Emily, who hugged her daughter tighter.

“And you were high up?” he asked, turning back to Lizzie.

She nodded.

“How high?”

“A long way. I could see people below, though. They were shouting at us, and some of them were trying to climb up after us, but for some reason they kept falling off. The woman said...” Another pause. “The woman said it had taken her years to climb up so far. She said she didn't know why, but she was a better climber than the others.”

“What did the people look like?”

“They didn't have any clothes on. Their skin was gray.”

“And the woman who was holding you...”

“She was the same.”

“What did her face look like?”

“Not like Loretta Lynn,” Emily said darkly.

He turned to her.

“I'm not that stupid,” she added. “Nice try, though.”

“Her skin was broken,” Lizzie explained, “like it was all dry and there were cracks in it. Some of it was missing, and...” She paused, before reaching up and running a hand over the front of her own face, as if she was feeling the bones beneath her flesh. “It was scary. I could see her skeleton. She held onto me, though. If she hadn't, I'd have fallen.”

“And that lasted the whole twenty-four hours?” he asked. “Until you came back?”

“It wasn't that long,” she replied. “It was more like... I don't know, just a few seconds.”

“Time passes differently on the other side,” Emily explained. “At least, that's what the voice told me when I was younger. A few seconds over there seems like a day or more for us. All of this, from when I was a girl to today, has probably just seemed like a minute or two to the woman on the other side of the wall.”

“It was really cold,” Lizzie added.

“So this woman pulled you through,” Robert continued, making a note on his pad, “and then what?”

“That's when she offered me the deal,” Emily replied.

“What deal?”

“When I went into the bedroom tonight,” she continued, “after I heard the noises, there were something in there. I heard the voice. She told me she didn't want Lizzie, that she just wanted to come through me to get back into this world. She said that if I agreed to stop resisting, she'd let Lizzie come back, that I could save Lizzie if I gave myself to her.”

“And you agreed?”

“Of course I agreed.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then the wall just seemed to...” She paused. “There was an explosion of light, and Lizzie came stumbling through. I told her to be good, to get out of there, and then a hand came through and grabbed my legs. It started pulling me into the hole, and then...”

“And then?” he asked.

“And then you showed up,” she added, with a hint of bitterness, “and saved me. You made me break the deal.”

“Do you think I made the wrong decision?”

“I think I was willing to accept the deal. I understand why you did it, but I was still willing to accept whatever she offered me, so long as she left Lizzie alone.”

“What would have happened if I hadn't been there?” he asked.

“I would have been trapped on the other side, on the wall, and the woman would have been in this world again.” She paused. “She said she just wanted to be here. She said her life was taken from her, she said she was too young and that it was unfair, and she said she wanted another chance to spend time in this world. She just wants to be a ghost, to see this place again. I don't think she's evil, I think she's just desperate.”

“And a good climber, apparently,” he muttered, making another note.

“Do you know about the wall?” Emily asked. “I mean, does this story make any sense to you at all?”

“I've read about something similar once,” he replied. “There's an old book that mentions something that might be the wall you're talking about. Doug's trying to get a copy sent to us, but it's very hard to get its custodians to let it out of their sight. What we have to focus on right now is the fact that you still might not be safe.”

“You have to let me complete the deal I made,” Emily replied. “It's the only way to stop it coming after us.”

“That might not be true.”

“It'll try again tonight,” she continued. “I have to, she said as much. She'll either take Lizzie and try to force her way through her soul, which she says is a harder route, or she'll take me, which she says is easier.” She paused for a moment, with tears in her eyes. “I'm willing to give up my life if it means my daughter is safe.”

“Mummy,” Lizzie whispered, “what does that mean?”

“It means everything's going to be okay,” she replied, leaning down and kissing the top of Lizzie's head before turning to Robert. “It can still reach us here, you know. The house has nothing to do with anything, it's just where we happened to be. Now we're here, and it'll still come. I know what I have to do.”

“We can still work something out,” Robert told her, before hearing voices in the next room. Glancing at the door for a moment, he realized Douglas was talking to someone. “Wait right here,” he added as he got to his feet. “I'll be back in a moment.”

Heading to the door, he slipped through into the next room and stopped as soon as he saw Jenna standing by the desk with Douglas.

“Hey,” she said, turning to him with a faint but apprehensive smile. “Sounds like you've got a lot going on here.”

***

“Of course I came back,” she continued a few minutes later, as they reached the cafeteria. “When Doug told me what had happened, I got on the first flight back.”

“And Tim wasn't annoyed?”

“His name's Tom,” she replied with a faint smile, “and... I'll make it up to him later.”

“Sorry to drag you away from the skiing season,” he added, grabbing a sandwich from the counter.

“Douglas Whale is the most level-headed, least hyperbolic man I've ever met in my life,” she replied. “When he called me and started describing the events of last night, I just knew I had to come and be part of whatever the hell you guys are doing. Believe me, last-minute plane tickets aren't cheap.”

“I guess the gang's back together,” he muttered, heading to the cash desk.

“Don't get ahead of yourself,” she replied. She kept quiet as they paid, preferring not to say anything more until they were out of anyone else's earshot. “You do realize that you're harboring a wanted criminal, don't you?” she continued. “Seriously, Rob, they mentioned it on the radio! How long do you think it's going to take before they put two and two together, and come after you? They're going to figure out what's happening eventually, and then you're going to be in trouble as well! You lied to the police!”

“I had to.”

“You always have to go to extremes, don't you?”

“Did they mention the house?” he asked, sidestepping her question.

“What about it?”

“I assume the police have looked over the place. Did they say on the news whether there was any damage after everything that happened last night?”

“No, but apparently the neighbors reported seeing two weird men with Emily,” she continued. “Does that ring any bells? Do you and Doug have any idea who the two weird men might have been?”

“Well, Doug's a little strange,” he replied, “but -”

“I'm serious!” Stepping in front of him to block his way, she paused for a moment. “I take it this means you're no longer a skeptic?”

“It means I'm...” He paused. “You should have seen it last night, Jenna. It was right there in front of us, I even saw something in there, something reaching out from some kind of...” Another pause. “I was about to describe it as a portal to another world, but frankly that'd sound ridiculous. It was a doorway to some place, though, and from Lizzie's description, it sounds very much like the land of the dead. You've read the Myrkia, right?”

“Parts of it. It's kind of long-winded.”

“Right. Even I haven't quite read it all, I skipped some of the addenda. Whoever wrote it, they had a very dry style, but the basic information in that book, and the descriptions of the world inhabited by dead souls... It's remarkably similar to the things that Lizzie and Emily have been talking about.”

“So what do we do now?” Jenna asked. “Doug seems to think that whatever's out there, it's still coming after Emily.”

“I'm sure it is. We have to be ready for tonight.”

“Then I'm in,” she replied.

“Are you sure?”

“I didn't fly all the way back just to make coffee,” she pointed out. “I always knew... Well, that's not true. I always hoped that one day you'd get interested in this stuff again.” She paused, as if there was something else she wanted to say. “Maybe -”

“Jenna -”

“We should get back to Doug and the others,” she continued, interrupting him. “And... Have you seen the news today? Have you read any of the reports about Emily and Lizzie going missing?”

He shook his head. “To be honest, I've kind of been avoiding them.”

“Then I guess there's another part of this mess that you don't know about. Rob, something else happened last night. It's probably just a coincidence, but I think at the very least you need to tell Emily.”

***

“I don't know how to react,” Emily replied, staring at the floor with a hint of shock in her eyes. “Does that make me a bad person?”

“Not at all,” Robert told her. “We all grieve in our own way.”

“It's not like she was a candidate for Mother of the Year,” she continued, “but she was still... What exactly happened, again?”

“From what I read,” Jenna replied, “your mother died peacefully in her sleep at the nursing home.”

“They always say that, though, don't they?” Emily pointed out, sniffing back tears. “They want to spare the families.” She paused, before turning to Robert. “You don't think it could be connected to all of this, do you?”

“I don't see how,” he replied, “but we can't rule anything out at the moment. There's so much about this that we don't know.”

“The voice, the woman, the... whatever she is... She didn't mention my mother at all.”

“Then it probably was just a coincidence,” Jenna told her. “Had your mother been ill lately?”

“Only for the past decade or so,” Emily muttered with a faint, sad smile. “She was always complaining about aches and pains, but she talked a lot less once the dementia had really taken root. I remember once, she...” Pausing, she turned to Robert again. “One time, right at the start, when her symptoms were first showing, I asked her how it felt. She said it was as if someone was clawing at her mind, scraping away her memories and thoughts, almost as if they were trying to hollow out her skull from the inside. I guess it's at least possible that -”

“Let's not go down that avenue just yet,” Robert told her. “We need to focus on you and Lizzie.”

“She wasn't always the old harpy you met,” Emily continued. “You know what people are like, they tend to embrace stereotypes and start acting up, but I swear she could be...” She paused again, thinking back to the better times with her mother. “There was more to her. A lot more. Believe it or not, she could be kind and she could be caring, and she definitely wasn't the worst mother in the world. Obviously she made some bad decisions, but...”

“She was still your mother,” Jenna said after a moment, reaching out and putting a hand on Emily's shoulder. “I'm sorry for your loss.”

“But there'll be time for this later,” Emily replied, taking a deep breath as if she was trying to steel herself. “I can think about her tomorrow. Today we need to focus on this thing that's going to be coming after Lizzie and me. It's not going to give up, is it?”

“I doubt it,” Robert replied. “Not after all this time.”

“So what are we going to do?”

He paused for a moment. “The only thing we can do. Somehow, we're going to end it. Tonight.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Fifty-nine years ago

“Joyce! Stanley! Come on!”

Joyce and her brother Stanley both turned at the same time, looking out from under the rain-soaked awning and watching as their father waved at them from the doorway of a cafe.

“Move!” he shouted, before heading inside.

“I hate Blackpool,” Stanley muttered dourly.

“It's probably okay in summer,” Joyce replied, turning to him.

“We can't afford to come in summer,” he pointed out. “We can only afford to come in November. I'm freezing.”

“Me too.” Getting to her feet, she headed to the edge of the awning and watched as torrential rain pounded the small square in front of the cafe. For a moment, she felt as if she was in the most desolate place in the whole world, and when she looked up at the sky she found it hard to believe that the sun was still shining somewhere behind the thick clouds.

“We're gonna get soaked by the time we're halfway,” Stanley muttered, stopping next to her.

“Yep,” she replied.

“And for what? A sandwich in some grubby cafe.”

“It might be a nice sandwich.”

“You're an idiot.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out two bent, scuffed cigarettes. “I half-inched these from the car. Want one?”

She opened her mouth to turn him down, but suddenly he slipped one of the cigarettes into her hand and pulled a box of matches from his pocket.

“Stick it in your mouth,” he told her.

Doing as she was told, she watched him light a match and hold it up to the cigarette. Once it was lit, he did the same to his.

“Just breathe in slow,” he continued, “and -”

Before he could finish, she started coughing, and in the process she dropped the cigarette into a puddle.

“Idiot!” he hissed. “You've ruined it now!” As if to prove his point, he took a long, slow drag on his own and then breathed out.

“That stinks,” she replied, waving the smoke away.

“You'll get used to it. It's what grown-ups do.”

She paused for a moment. “Got any more?”

He smiled, before letting her try his. “Don't drop it,” he warned her.

She took a puff and, this time, she managed not to cough.

“I just want to hibernate,” he added. “Next winter, stick me in a box with some straw, and I'll sleep for six months. Like the neighbor's tortoise.”

“When I grow up,” Joyce replied, watching rain hitting the puddles as she took another drag on the cigarette, “I'm not going to have holidays in Blackpool. I'm going to have holidays in the sun, somewhere really exotic and hot.”

“How are you gonna afford that?”

“I'm gonna get a job, stupid.”

“You're a girl.”

“I'm still gonna get a job, and when I have a family of my own, and a rich husband, we're gonna go somewhere really posh and expensive for our holidays.”

“Whatever,” Stanley muttered, grabbing the cigarette from her. He took another drag, before pressing the tip against the wall to put it out and then slipping it back into his pocket. Ahead of them, the rain had intensified. “We'll have more later. You ready to do this?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” he replied. “Three. Two.” He paused. “One!”

Together, they ran out into the rain.

Twenty-four years ago

“So you're saying we can't sue any of them?” Joyce snapped, sitting on the stairs as she spoke to the lawyer over the phone. “Fat lot of good you are, then.”

Slamming the phone down, she lit another cigarette and took a long, slow drag. Looking over at the window, she realized it was raining again.

“Mummy?”

Turning, she saw that Emily was at the top of the stairs.

“I thought I told you to go to bed?”

“Who were you talking to?”

“Never mind. No-one.”

“You sounded angry.”

“I'll sound angrier in a minute if you don't sod off to bed.” She took another drag. “Go on, scram. You've got school in the morning.”

“But -”

“Bed!” she shouted. “Now!”

Once Emily had gone back to her room, Joyce hauled herself up and made her way to the front room. She grabbed a bottle of sherry and poured herself a glass, before flopping down on the sofa and taking a couple more drags on her cigarette. Leaning back, she closed her eyes for a moment and tried to empty her mind, while holding smoke in her mouth for as long as she could manage. Finally, slowly, she exhaled, and she opened her eyes to watch as the smoke rose up toward the ceiling.

“Fuckers,” she muttered finally. “People with money... They won't give us the time of day.”

Reaching over to the coffee table, she was about to check the Radio Times when she spotted the holiday brochures she'd picked up in town a few weeks earlier. Grabbing one, she flicked it open until she found the page with a turned-down corner. She'd gone through all the brochures carefully a few days earlier and finally she'd found a hotel in southern Majorca that looked absolutely perfect. Looking at the photos again, she saw the beautiful, large pool with its blue water glistening under the Mediterranean sun, and then she turned to the photos of a nearby beach, showing happy families playing together.

“One day, kid,” she whispered, flicking through a few more pages as she tried to imagine herself and Emily on a beach. “One bloody day.”

Chapter Thirty

Today

“This is it,” Robert said as he set the huge, delicate book on the table. “The Myrkia.”

“It smells,” Lizzie replied, taking a half-step back so she could watch from behind her mother.

“It positively stinks,” Robert added with a smile. “This thing spends most of its time locked away in one of the oldest libraries in the country. Seriously, it's a miracle Doug managed to persuade them to send it to us. The damn thing's worth in excess of five million pounds.”

“It's the only extant copy,” Douglas muttered, slipping his hands into a set of plastic gloves. “We believe around twenty were originally printed when it was published a few hundred years ago. Since then, the Myrkia has faded into obscurity, and most people would tell you that's a perfectly fine thing. As far as the academic world is concerned, the Myrkia is a curio at best, and a waste of time at worst.”

“So why's it relevant to us?” Emily asked, eying the book with suspicion. “I don't understand.”

“Almost everything you two have said to us,” Robert replied, “seems to reference events that are described in this book. The Myrkia was written by an anonymous Londoner who claimed to be receiving the text, word for word, from some kind of spirit that contacted him. He claimed that the spirit told him this was the true book of the dead, an account not only of what it's like to die, but also of the afterlife. Almost like a guidebook to some vast, lost world, the place souls end up when they die. Most people have dismissed the whole thing as a failed stunt.”

“You won't find many people studying this thing,” Douglas continued. “It's far too obscure.”

“The Myrkia describes the land of the dead in great detail,” Jenna explained. “Most accounts of such places tend to focus on a state of being, on the experience of being dead. The Myrkia is different. It catalogs a vast world with various different areas. There are rivers, mountains, valleys... even towns and cities. If you read this book, you get the impression that the world of the dead is just as rich and just as varied as the world of the living.”

“I still don't get how it's going to help us,” Emily replied.

“Mummy,” Lizzie whispered, “I'm scared. I don't like the book.”

“Here's the page,” Douglas said, opening the book and turning to Jenna. “It's right here.”

“Listen to this part,” Jenna continued, stepping closer to the book and looking down at the intricately handwritten, partially-faded and cracked pages. “There is only one way out of the dead place,” she read, “and that is through the souls of the living, for the souls of the living are as doorways to the souls of the dead. At the far eastern end of the dead place, there exists a wall, constantly shifting and changing with the souls of living people, who are stitched together in such a manner that they stretch far into the sky above. Those who wish to escape the dead place can be found massing at the base of this wall, trying to climb up so that they can find a particularly weak soul, through which they might be able to break back into the land of the living.”

“Those affected souls,” Douglas added, turning to Emily, “are said to be aware of this to some degree. Not in a tangible way, but more of a sensation.”

Emily felt a shiver run through her body. “So you're saying that one of these dead people climbed up a wall of souls until they reached... me?” She turned to Robert. “Why me?”

“Sheer bad luck,” he suggested. “You just happen to offer a way through.”

“Listen,” Jenna told them, still reading from the book. “Climbing the wall is not the work of a moment. It can take years for a dead soul to rise this way, and most will slip and fall, necessitating that they start again. Very few ever make it far enough, and their task is made more difficult by the fact that when one second passes in their world, whole days and even years pass in the land of the living. By the time a dead soul reaches its target, the target might be gone, since the soul might have passed on.”

“So that might explain why the ghost left you alone for so long,” Robert continued, turning to Emily. “It climbed up and tried to get through you when you were a girl. If it fell and had to climb again, maybe it has only just got back to where it was before.”

“And now it wants to break through me?” she asked.

“It would need to drag you through and take your place in the wall,” Jenna explained. “It would literally pull you into its world and then climb through. Without a body of its own, it would most likely manifest as a ghost. I assume that, at some point once it entered this world, its soul would be patched into the wall, taking your place and leaving you trapped in the world of the dead forever.”

“Or unless you managed to find another soul,” Douglas suggested. “One you, in turn, could break through.”

“This is insane,” Emily replied. “I thought it was just a ghost. You that know, someone who died and then they came back and started haunting the house.”

“If only it was that simple,” Robert muttered.

“The implications of this are profound,” Jenna added. “If this part of the Myrkia is correct, then...” She stared for a moment at the vast book. “There are more than a thousand pages here. What if they're all true? This book might be an A to Z to the entire dead world, it might be a kind of Rosette Stone that lets us understand what's really happening all around us.”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” Douglas warned her, “there's -”

“No,” Robert interjected, “let's definitely get ahead of ourselves. This is the most exciting thing that's happened to humanity in decades, maybe ever. We have to proceed with caution, but we also have a duty to push ahead and find out what the hell is really going on here.” He turned to Emily. “Besides, we have no choice. If we're right, this woman is going to try to get at you again tonight. She's desperate, she won't give up.”

“Is there any way of stopping her,” Emily asked, “or is it best if I just...” She looked down at Lizzie and saw the fear in the little girl's eyes.

“I don't know if we can stop her completely,” Robert replied, “but I think we can keep her away from you two.”

Emily turned back to him. “How?”

“It says right here,” he continued, pointing at the book. “A second in the dead place can equate to days, weeks, maybe even years here. If we can slow the creature down, maybe knock it back down the wall so that it has to climb again... By the time it gets back up to you, you could well be in your eighties, your nineties...”

“Or dead?” she suggested.

“Problem solved,” he pointed out.

“But then it'd just go after someone else.”

“Maybe by then we'll be able to communicate with it,” he continued. “It was a living person once, there's no reason to believe that it can't be reasoned with. Either way, we need to focus on keeping the pair of you safe, and right now this seems like the best option. We need to find some way to knock the creature back when it reaches through. It might be as easy as pushing a broom handle through, although I'd like to think that maybe we can make contact. Peace in our time, and so on.”

“With the dead?” Jenna asked.

“Why not?” He turned to her. “This creature, this woman, has apparently been nattering away to Emily and Lizzie for long enough, so obviously it's capable of an actual conversation. We might be able to reason with it, to learn from it, maybe even find a way to let it through without harming anyone.”

“You're not serious,” Douglas replied. “Let it through? You don't even know what it is!”

“It's a dead person,” he continued. “I hardly think it's some kind of evil creature from hell that's going to burn the planet to ashes. Everything we've seen so far suggests that it's something that simply wants to come back to the land of the living and, I don't know, feel the sun on its face again, something like that.”

“Mummy,” Lizzie said, tugging on Emily's arm. “I don't like this. Can we go?”

“I have to stay,” she replied, “but...” She turned to the others. “Lizzie doesn't need to be here.”

“I'd hesitate to take her away,” Robert told her. “This thing has already shown a willingness to use Lizzie to get to you. I wouldn't want to tempt it again, especially since you broke the agreement you made. It might be angry.”

“So we just have to wait?” Lizzie asked. “Last night it struck at around midnight.”

“Then maybe it'll be the same this time,” Jenna said. “All we can do is wire you up and hope for the best.”

“I want to talk to it,” Robert continued, looking down at the Myrkia for a moment. “Tonight we're going to make sure Emily and Lizzie are safe. Starting tomorrow, though, we're going to start using this book as a guide to help us explore whatever's out there.”

***

“Mummy,” Lizzie said a short while later, as they sat in Robert's office and waited for him to fetch them, “why can't we just run away?”

“This thing is just going to follow us,” Emily replied, reaching out and brushing the girl's hair back. “It's not haunting a house or a place. It's haunting me.”

“Why you?”

She forced a smile. “I guess I'm just lucky.”

“But it won't take you away, will it?”

“Take me away?”

Leaning forward, Lizzie put her arms around her mother. “I don't want it to take you where it took me,” she whispered. “I saw...”

Emily waited for her to continue. “You saw what, sweetheart?”

“I saw...” She paused. “I thought I saw Grandma.”

“When?”

“On the other side.”

“Last night?”

Lizzie nodded. “But I can't have done, can I? Because Grandma's in that home.”

“Your grandmother...” Pausing, Emily realized that maybe it was time to tell her about Joyce's death. In the rush of the day so far, she'd been more than willing to push all thoughts of her own mother out of the way, and she'd told herself that she'd focus on that point some other time. “What exactly did you see Grandma doing?” she asked finally.

“I didn't tell the man because I was scared,” she continued, “but... When I was on the other side, high up on the wall with the woman holding my arm, I looked down and saw all those people down below. They all looked gray and angry, and one of them...” She sniffed back tears. “It looked like Grandma.”

“Well, Grandma's...”

Before she could finish, Emily head the door opening, and she looked over to see Robert leaning through.

“We're ready for you,” he told them. “It's time to put the plan into action.”

***

“Wow,” Emily said as she and Lizzie followed Robert into the main lab, “you guys really didn't mess about, did you?”

Ahead of them, a chair had been set up in the center of the room, with various wires running from the frame to a set of computers on a nearby desk. Monitors and laptops had been lined up to keep track of proceedings, and cameras had been positioned as far back as the rear wall, with more outside beyond the windows.

“We're not taking any chances,” Robert explained. “At the house last night, all the cameras and monitoring equipment suddenly stopped working, but the gear in the car seemed fine. We figure there's a radius of potential interference, so we need cameras far enough back that they won't be affected. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and we'll learn for next time.”

She turned to him. “Next time?”

“This is just the beginning. Day zero, so to speak. We're going to communicate with the people on the other side.”

“And I'm going to sit in that thing, am I?” she asked, eying the main chair cautiously. “Why are there handcuffs attached to it?”

“Why do you think?” he replied, stopping next to the chair. “If the creature tries to drag you through, we want to make it a little more difficult.”

“By tying me down?”

“Got any better ideas?”

“Mummy,” Lizzie whispered, tugging on Emily's arm, “I don't like it.”

“It's okay,” she replied, tousling the hair on top of her daughter's head. “It's just one time.”

“Sorry, Lizzie,” Robert said, smiling at her, “but we figure it's safer for you to be here. You just have to trust that we know what we're doing, and that we're not going to let anything bad happen to your mother.”

Eying him with suspicion, Lizzie frowned.

“Do you really think anything'll happen?” Emily asked, as she sat down. “I mean, wouldn't this creature, whatever it is, stay away as soon as it saw all this equipment?”

“I don't think it can,” Robert replied, grabbing the handcuffs and slipping them over her left wrist. “It's desperate, and it probably thinks there's nothing we can do to stop it. From its point of view, probably only a second has passed since last night and tonight. If there's a -”

“Wait,” she said suddenly, reaching out at the last moment to keep him from clicking the cuffs shut.

“Don't be scared,” he told her.

“I'm not, but -” She paused, before sighing. “Okay, I am. The truth is, I've always been scared, even that first time you hooked me up to stuff all those years ago.”

“I've spent half my life hooking women up to machines,” he replied. “Maybe I have a problem, huh?”

“I'm serious.”

“We were both younger then,” he pointed out. “We've both learned things.”

“I'm sorry I lied.”

“I'm sorry I didn't do a better job of getting to the truth,” he told her. “Still, we're here now and I'm convinced this is going to work. You just have to trust me.”

She paused again. “I do,” she said finally, reaching out and clicking the cuffs shut around her left wrist. “Just don't lose the key, okay?”

“I won't,” he replied with a smile, as he closed the other set of handcuffs around her right wrist. “Jenna, Doug and I are going to be here the whole time. We've got multiple plans worked out, depending on the various possibilities, and I wouldn't be putting you through this if I thought there was any substantial danger. I mean, being a pioneer in any field is always going to carry a certain risk, but I'm confident. We'll keep Lizzie safe too.”

“But if it gets to the point where you have no other options,” she whispered, keen to ensure that Lizzie didn't hear, “and if there's any sign that my daughter's in danger... Just let me go.”

“It won't come to that.”

“But if it does...”

He paused, sensing the earnestness in her voice. “Fine,” he muttered. “You have my word.”

“She's all that matters,” Emily continued. “She's the only good thing that's ever come from my life.”

“You'll need this,” he replied, fixing a sensor to her chest, just below her collarbone. “It's an all-in-one, we'll have more than enough data. Would you like a thumb-tack to stick in your shoe?”

Smiling, she shook her head. “Good luck,” she told him. “You'll get your big break after all.”

“Good luck to you too,” he replied, taking a step back, “and remember, this is uncharted territory. I think we're really going to make history tonight, but it's not about big breaks. That's not what's important.”

She held out her hand for him to shake. “I guess we're finishing something we started a long time ago.”

“I guess we are,” he replied, shaking her hand before turning and heading over to the desk where Jenna was working on one of the laptops. “Did I just say that? My big break isn't important?” He smiled. “If only the twenty-something me could hear the fifty-something me. He'd be shitting bricks.”

“Language,” Jenna replied, nodding toward Lizzie, who was standing nearby.

“You know what I mean,” he muttered, checking the instruments and seeing that all the readings were in order. “If you'd told me even a few days ago that I'd end up back in the same room with Emily Stone, I'd never have believed you. I'd have -”

“Small increase in v-wave pressure,” she pointed out, tapping one of the screens.

“What do you think it means?”

“Nothing. Something. I'll keep an eye on it. It seems to be localized just a few feet from Emily, though.”

“Seems a bit early for anything to happen,” he replied, checking his watch. “It's still a few hours until midnight. Still, maybe it takes a while to build up.” He watched for a moment as Jenna made some adjustments to one of the machines. “Sorry,” he added finally.

“For what?”

“For being a drunken ass twenty-four years ago.”

She turned to him.

“And ever since,” he added. “Oh, and also for driving you into the arms of a man as wet and boring as Tim or Tom or whatever his name is. The guy's an idiot. He doesn't deserve you.”

“Her heart-rate's steady,” she replied, clearly preferring to steer the conversation back to more practical matters. “Blood pressure's a little high, but that's not exactly a shock. All other vital signs are fine.”

“The calm before the storm,” Douglas suggested from nearby.

“Is she going to be okay?” Lizzie asked, watching as her mother waited in the chair.

“She's going to be fine, honey,” Jenna replied, smiling at her. “We'll take good care of her, I promise.”

“That v-wave pressure's still rising,” Douglas pointed out. “Slow but steady. What do you think it means?”

“It means we need to keep an eye on her,” Robert replied, watching Emily with caution. “No fuck-ups, people.”

Jenna nudged him.

“I mean, no mistakes,” he added, turning to Lizzie and smiling.

For the next few hours, all they could do was wait. Jenna split her time between the laptops and Lizzie, while Robert kept his eyes fixed on Emily, watching for any sign of a disturbance. He glanced regularly at the nearby monitor, noting what seemed to be a consistent rise in some of the numbers, and once or twice he exchanged a nervous glance with Douglas. They both knew that the events of the previous night had erupted suddenly, and that they were unlikely to get much warning. As midnight rolled around, they were all becoming more tense, while Lizzie had fallen asleep in a chair over by the door.

“Maybe the ghost is shy,” Jenna said as she checked the readings for the thousandth time. “Or spirit, or demon, or... whatever this thing is.”

“Are you okay over there?” Robert called out, glancing at Emily.

“I'm fine.” She sounded tense. “How's Lizzie doing?”

He turned to look at the sleeping girl. “She's taking a nap. I think she -”

Before he could finish, the overhead lights started flickering for a moment before finally dying. He turned, just as the rest of the lights in the room blinked off, and a moment later some of the computer terminals went black.

“Power cut?” Jenna suggested, with obvious concern in her voice.

“I'll check the supply,” Douglas muttered, heading across the room.

“Is something wrong?” Emily asked.

Looking over at her, Robert realized he could barely make her out in the glow from the few remaining laptops that were running on battery power.

“No,” he said cautiously, “it's fine, we just -”

Suddenly the laptops shut down, leaving them all standing in pitch darkness.

A moment later, Douglas could be heard tripping over something on the far side of the room.

“You okay?” Jenna called out.

“Fine,” he muttered, “just caught a chair leg.” He paused. “My goddamn phone isn't working.”

“Guys?” Emily said nervously. “Is every electrical device off?”

“Looks like it,” Robert replied, glancing around and realizing he couldn't see a thing. The main laboratory only had one set of windows, up at the top of the far wall, but the blinds were down. “I'm gonna get some light in here,” he continued, feeling his way past the workbench and starting to make his way over to where he knew he'd find the pulleys that operated the blinds. “Even if it's just from above, it might help. I doubt this thing can turn the goddamn moon off. Everyone just stay calm.”

Walking carefully across the dark, quiet room, he held his hands out so that he wouldn't go straight into the wall.

“It's getting kind of cold in here, don't you think?” Jenna called out.

“Maybe,” he muttered, finally reaching the wall and starting to feel his way along. “Let's just focus on -”

“Something's happening,” Emily said suddenly.

Stopping, Robert turned and looked across the darkness, but he still couldn't see her. “What?” he asked. He waited for a moment. “Emily? What is it?”

“I don't know, but...” She paused. “I can feel something. It's inside me.”

“Describe it.” He took a step toward her voice.

“I don't know, but it's really uncomfortable,” she continued. She could be heard shifting in the chair, as if she was trying to get free. “Can you get me out of here? It's like something's -”

Her voice trailed off, and a moment later she let out a faint gasp.

Robert took a few steps forward. “It's like something's what?” he asked.

“Mummy?” Lizzie could be heard saying from the other side of the room.

“Emily?” Robert continued, edging closer through the darkness, still unable to see anything. “Talk to me, Emily. What's happening?”

“It's -” She let out another gasp. “It's like hands in my chest. Cold hands.”

“What do you mean by that? What kind of hands?”

“Somebody get some light in here!” Jenna shouted. “Open the blinds! Let's see if we can get some moonlight!”

“It doesn't hurt,” Emily continued, “it's more -” She paused, before letting out a sudden, breathless cry. “It's like they're filling me, reaching up to my -”

“Keep talking,” Robert hissed, as he pulled his phone from his pocket and tried to get some light from the screen, only to find that it was dead. Edging closer to where he thought he'd find Emily's chair, he reached out. “Tell me what you're feeling. I need to hear your voice so I can find you.”

“Hands,” she whispered, “in -”

He waited.

“Emily? Are you -”

Suddenly she let out another cry of pain.

“Is anyone getting the blinds?” Jenna called out.

“Emily, talk to me!” Robert shouted, reaching out in an attempt to find her. Stumbling forward, he turned as he realized he must have gone too far. For a moment, he felt as disorientated and lost as he'd felt on all those drunk, late-night sessions on the campus. “Emily!”

She cried out again.

“Mummy!” Lizzie shouted. “Where are you?”

“It's okay,” Robert continued, trying to follow the sound of Emily's sobs. With his arms outstretched, he waited to find her in the darkness. “Emily, talk to me!”

“Hands,” she gasped, before letting out a sudden scream.

“Hang on,” he told her, stepping forward until finally he felt the chair's wooden frame. Reaching down to her hands, he felt the handcuffs and realized she was gripping the armrest. “You're going to be fine,” he added, running his hands onto her torso, “I'm just -”

Stopping suddenly, he realized that her whole body was tense and that there was something shifting and churning in her chest.

“Emily, talk to me,” he continued, as he felt a distinct shape pressing up from beneath her flesh. After a moment, he realized it was almost as if a hands was trying to break through. “Jesus Christ,” he shouted, “can someone get some light in here?”

“Please,” Emily whispered, “just look after Lizzie...”

“This isn't over,” he told her, as he felt her body starting to shudder. “Emily, stay with me! You have to -”

Before he could finish, he heard the blinds being opened, and a moment later a patch of moonlight fell across the room. As soon as he saw Emily, he took a step back, shocked by the sight of large shapes pushing out through her belly and chest. Her head was tilted back and her mouth was open as she let out a series of slow, regular grunts.

“Mummy!” Lizzie screamed. She ran forward, before Jenna grabbed her from behind and held her back.

“It's okay,” Robert continued, trying to stay calm as he watched Emily's convulsing body. “Emily, try to stay with me. Try to focus on the sound of my voice.” He looked down at her wrists and saw that the handcuffs had begun to dig deep into her skin, causing blood to trickle down onto the chair.

“What the hell is happening to her?” Douglas asked as he edged closer.

“I think something's trying to take her,” he replied, “but the handcuffs are working, they're holding her here.” Looking down at the floor, he saw that the legs of the chair were shuddering, as if something was trying to pull them loose from the bolts.

“What are you doing to her?” Lizzie shouted. “Leave her alone!”

Reaching down, Robert lifted the front of Emily's shirt until he could see her bare belly, at which point he realized that something was definitely in there. He thought back to the description in the Myrkia of human souls stitched into a vast wall, and that was exactly what it looked like: hands grabbing at the inside of Emily's body, trying to pull her through. After a moment, he realized he could hear faint snapping sounds from inside, as if her ribs were being broken one by one. Looking at her face, he saw that blood was running from one corner of her mouth.

“Stay with me!” he told her.

“We need to get help!” Jenna shouted.

“Wait!” he replied, moving around to the back of the chair and looking down at Emily's face. He tried to force her eyes open, only to find that her eyeballs had rolled back, leaving just the whites showing.

“Mummy!” Lizzie shouted. “Why aren't you helping her?”

“I -”

Before he could finish, Robert realized the air all around him was getting colder. He looked across the moonlit room and saw Jenna still holding Lizzie tight, and then he turned back to Emily just as he heard a loud ripping sound. A blinding shaft of blue-and-white light broke through from the space just behind the chair, forcing him to cover his eyes and take a step back.

“What the hell is that?” Jenna shouted.

“I have no idea,” he replied, staring into the crack as it grew and grew, as if the air itself was splitting open. “There's something in there,” he added, as her saw a dark shape moving on the other side of the crack.

“Is she dead?” Douglas asked, still holding back a few meters.

Turning to Emily, Robert began to check for a pulse. As soon as he placed two fingers on the side of her neck and pushed a little, he realized her heart was beating hard and fast.

“She's still with us,” he replied, turning back to look at the crack of light, “she -”

Stopping suddenly, he realized a face was staring back at him. With parts of her flesh eaten away, and her skull and many of her other bones showing through, a woman was reaching out with a gnarled, rotten arm. He watched in horror as she put her hand on the back of the chair and closed her fingers around the wood, as if she was trying to anchor herself, and then slowly she began to pull herself through. Too shocked to move or react, he saw that she was reaching through with her other hand too, until finally she grabbed Emily's throat and tried to pull her back. When that didn't work, the dead woman began to emerge from the light, putting her hands on Emily's body and tugging at her.

“Don't look,” Jenna said, turning Lizzie around. “Whatever you do, don't look.”

Frozen to the spot, Robert watched as the dead woman reached down and tried to pull Emily's hands free from the handcuffs. When that failed, she told hold of Emily's wrists and paused for a moment before starting to tug as hard as she could, until finally Emily's skin began to tear and blood ran freely down the side of the chair. The skin on her hands was starting to get pulled away, exposing the raw meat below, until finally the hand became de-gloved. Pulling Emily's bloodied hand loose, with its muscles and bone exposed, the dead woman immediately moved around to start working on the other side.

“Wait!” Robert said firmly, finally managing to get past his sense of shock. “What do you want?”

“Robert, get back!” Jenna shouted.

The dead woman stared down at Emily for a moment, as if she could see even though her eyes were just empty sockets. After a few seconds, she turned to look at Robert.

“Let me help you,” he told her. “Let me study you, let me...” He paused, before reaching out and touching the dead woman's shoulder, checking that she was real. As his fingertips brushed her rotting flesh, he felt as if he'd finally made contact with something from another world. Even though she looked hideous, there was something strangely beautiful about the fact that such a thing could even exist.

“Robert!” Jenna shouted. “What the hell are you doing? Don't go too close!”

“It's okay,” he replied, while keeping his eyes fixed on the dead woman. “You don't have to take anyone,” he told her. “I'm a scientist, I can study what's happening, I can find another way to help you.”

He waited for a reply, but the dead woman simply stared at him.

“Do you understand me?” he asked. “Whatever's happening here, we can study it, we can work out the rules and then we can find a way to make sure that no-one has to suffer. Wouldn't that be better?”

He waited again, before spotting a hint of movement in the light behind the dead woman. Looking through, he realized he could see something far away, and finally he took a step closer until he was right at the edge of the crack.

“Robert!” Jenna shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Wait,” he whispered, peering through the crack. For a moment, the light was too blinding, but after a moment his eyes adjusted and he realized he was high up, looking down on a vast sea of swarming, writhing bodies. Most of the people below were scrambling past one another, but a few of them were trying to climb up.

“Robert!” Jenna screamed. “Stop!”

“It's all true,” he whispered, speaking more to himself than to anyone else as he stepped closer. Looking down into the crack, he saw for himself, for the first time, the vast dead place spreading toward a distant horizon. He knew he should hold back, that he should take a cautious, academic approach, but the sheer excitement of the moment was too much and he found himself taking another step forward.

Familiar voices were shouting at him, telling him to be careful, but their voices were fading to nothing.

“Every word of it,” he continued. “The Myrkia, it's all true.” He paused, before realizing that he needed to start work at once, that he had to find a way to explore this vast new reality. Turning, he had to shield his eyes again as he looked back into the laboratory. The dead woman was watching him intently, while in the distance he could just about make out Emily slumped in the chair and Jenna watching from further back.

As he looked at Jenna, he saw that she was still holding Lizzie tight, and that she was shouting at him, screaming at him, even though he could barely hear her.

“It's real,” he said, taking a step forward before the dead woman blocked his way. Looking into her hollow eyes, he felt a sense of absolute certainty, as if he was somehow reconnecting with the version of himself who, twenty-four years ago, had believed in such things. “We can work together,” he told the dead woman, filled with a sudden rush of excitement, as if anything was possible. “We can -”

Before he could finish, she stepped toward him and put her rotting hands on his shoulders.

“Will you do that?” he asked. “We're on the edge of something extraordinary. Life after death, everything that follows, we can explore it. Please, will you work with me?”

He waited for a reply.

“Please,” he continued, as she began to push against his shoulders, “just trust me. I need you to believe in me, the way I finally believe in you. We just -”

And that was when he realized he was starting to fall back.

“No!” he shouted, reaching out and trying to grab hold of something, anything, to keep himself up. He managed to brush his hand against the dead woman, but he couldn't get a grip.

The last thing he heard was Jenna screaming his name, as he tumbled back and began to fall. The whole vast new world spun around him as he tried to turn back and take hold of something, but it was far too late and he fell down until, finally, he crashed into the sea of bodies below. Some of them stayed standing and some of them crumpled, but they broke his fall until finally he hit the muddy ground with a pained grunt. As he struggled to get back up, he realized he could hear groaning voices all around, and finally he found that he was right in the middle of the sea of bodies, with gray-skinned, rotting figures pushing past him as they desperately tried to get past.

Turning, he looked up and saw the vast gray wall of souls towering high above.

Chapter Thirty-One

Forty-nine years ago

“And what's this place?” Robert asked, pointing at a large green shape on the map.

“That's China,” his mother replied.

“And has that been explored?”

“I think so. Pretty much.”

“Then where hasn't been explored?”

“Well,” she added with a smile, “I think people have been pretty much everywhere now, but that doesn't mean there aren't still things to discover. At school tomorrow, maybe you should -”

“I want to explore somewhere that no-one's been,” he said firmly.

“You might have to settle for something a little less crazy,” she told him. “There's still so much to discover in the world.”

“I want to go somewhere new,” he replied, staring at the map with a hint of annoyance that every spot seemed to have been colored and named. “I want to be an explorer. I want to find new things.”

Today

“Get some lights in here!” Jenna shouted, racing across the laboratory as the flickering blue-and-white light shrank to nothing. By the time she reached Emily, the crack was gone and there was only moonlight in the room.

“Mummy!” Lizzie screamed, racing forward.

“Robert!” Stepping past the chair where Emily was still in a slumped position, Jenna looked around desperately, hoping to spot Robert somewhere. She'd seen him falling into the light, and then she'd lost sight of him completely. She knew he couldn't be gone, that he had to be around somewhere, but there was only one way in and out of the room and she was certain he hadn't gone that way. A moment later, all the lights flickered back on, along with the computers and monitors on the workbenches, and she saw that not only had Robert disappeared, but so too had the dead woman.

“Mummy,” Lizzie whimpered, climbing up onto her mother's lap and reaching out to put a hand on the side of her face. “Mummy, please be okay,” she added, with tears running down her face. “Please...”

“Where is he?” Douglas shouted, hurrying over to join them.

“He's gone!” Jenna replied, still turning, still hoping to spot Robert somewhere. “I saw him falling, and then...”

“Bullshit,” Douglas continued as he reached her. “He has to be here somewhere. A man can't just disappear into thin air.”

“Robert!” Jenna shouted, with tears in her eyes. “Robert, can you hear me?”

“Mummy?” Lizzie continued, nudging the side of Emily's face. “Mummy, say something.”

“Jesus Christ,” Douglas muttered, tilting Emily's head to one side and checking for a pulse. “She's alive,” he added, before looking down at her bloodied, skinless hand, “but barely. We need an ambulance. Her pulse is weak and she's lost a lot of blood.”

“Where is he?” Jenna replied, looking down at the spot where she'd last seen Robert. “Where the hell did he go?”

***

“Let me get this straight,” the police officer said with a frown as he sat with Douglas and Jenna at a table in the hospital's cafeteria, “you're claiming that -”

“We already told you everything,” Douglas replied firmly, interrupting him. “Please, don't make us go through it all again. It was hard enough the first time and our story isn't going to change.”

“Right...” The detective paused for a moment, staring at his own notepad as if he didn't believe a word he'd written down. He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out; a few seconds later he tried again, but there were still no words. It was clear that he had no idea where to start. “You do realize,” he said finally, “that a man is missing, right? That's a serious situation, and the version of events you've given me -”

“Is what happened,” Jenna said coldly, staring at him with tear-stained eyes. “Word for word, that's exactly what happened in the lab a few hours ago.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Huh.” He paused. “I'm sure you can understand that I -”

“We have no proof,” she added.

“No, you don't.”

“You can ask us for proof until you're blue in the face,” she continued, “but we've got none to give you. No photos, no videos, no samples or substances. There's nothing.”

“All the equipment failed,” Douglas continued. “Obviously the event, whatever it was, caused some kind of...” His voice trailed off for a moment. “To be honest, I'm not sure what is caused, but on two occasions now it has been able to shut off equipment in its vicinity. Whether by accident or design, it would seem to be almost impossible to capture a visual or audio record of the phenomenon.”

“And we probably can't recreate it,” Jenna added, “because... It got what it wanted. It took the place of someone from this world.”

“And that would be Mr. Slocombe?”

She nodded.

“We need to focus on finding him,” the detective replied, “and...” He paused, eying them with suspicion. “He's one of the men who was at Emily Stone's house the other night, isn't he?”

“No idea,” Douglas replied.

“You wouldn't know anything about the bones, would you?”

“Bones?” Douglas paused. “What bones?”

“I got a call from the local station up there. Some time in the past twelve hours, a human skeleton showed up in the garden of Emily Stone's place. Seems like it came from deep down, maybe an unmarked grave. It's old, at least a couple of hundred years, and the coroner thinks it's female.”

“What will you do with it?” Jenna asked.

“It'll be examined,” he replied, “but I guess eventually it'll be given a burial. Probably at the local church.”

Jenna turned to Douglas. “Could that be her?” she asked. “Maybe that's why she wanted to come back through? Maybe she wanted someone to find her body and it was there all along, in the garden?”

“It's possible,” Douglas replied.

“Do you two want to loop me in on this?” the detective asked. “Do you have any proof at all to back up your version of events?”

“I already told you,” Jenna replied bitterly. “There's nothing.”

“Emily Stone can tell you what she saw,” Douglas suggested. “She was there. Lizzie too.”

“Ms. Stone has already told me that she believes your version of events,” the detective continued, “but that she remembers very little. Her daughter wasn't much use, either.”

“You won't find him,” Jenna replied, with tears in her eyes. “He's gone.”

“Gone where?”

She paused. “To whatever was on the other side of that... doorway. To whatever's out there waiting for people when they die.”

“But you said you don't believe Doctor Slocombe died?”

“He's in that place,” he continued, “but he's not necessarily dead.”

“Okay,” he continued with a faint, frustrated smile, “you're gonna have to run this past me again, because I'm getting all caught up in knots. Forget about proof for a minute, forget about trying to persuade me. Just tell me, in your own words, exactly what you think happened tonight.”

Jenna paused for a moment. “I think we lost someone we shouldn't have lost,” she said finally.

“You think he's dead?”

She paused. “No. I think the woman got exactly what she wanted. She came through and took his place, which means... I guess he must be where she was.”

***

At first he did what the others were doing. He tried desperately to climb the wall, to find a way up to a soul that might be weak, one that might let him through. He fell, of course, and finally he realized that there was no point. Even as the others all around him continued with their doomed quest, he stopped and took a step back, staring up at the wall. Finally, he turned and walked away.

“Joyce?”

Stopping suddenly, he realized that one of the figures heading toward the wall was familiar.

“Joyce!” he said again, hurrying toward her before realizing that she hadn't even noticed him. “It's me!” he added, grabbing her arm and pulling her back.

Turning to him, she stared with blank, dead eyes that seemed to have receded slightly into her skull. Her hair was loose and straggly, and the yellowy-orange nicotine stains on her lips were more noticeable now, set against gray skin.

“It's me,” he said again, keeping hold of her arm. “It's Doctor Slocombe from the university, remember?”

A flicker of recognition seemed to cross her eyes.

“Listen to me,” he continued, “we need to work together, we have to find a way to -”

Before he could finish, she turned and resumed her walk toward the wall.

“No!” he shouted, trying to keep hold of her. “Joyce!”

Turning again, she lunged at him, snarling with such ferocity that he took a step back and let go of her arm. For a moment, she seemed poised to attack him, before the anger faded as quickly as it had come.

“I have to...” She paused, before turning to look up at the wall again. “I have to get back,” she stammered. “It was too soon! I'm not ready!” Stumbling forward, she began to fight her way through the crowd.

“Joyce, wait!” he shouted, trying to keep up with her before realizing that she was already gone, lost in the sea of clamoring figures. He took a step back and watched as several men and women, in the distance, tried to climb the wall, only to fall before they could get too far. “This isn't going to work,” he whispered, struck by the hopelessness of the situation as more and more groaning figures pushed past him, heading to the wall. “There has to be another way back.”

Turning, he began to walk against the flow of the crowd, forcing his way through as everyone else hurried toward the wall, their cries ringing out like an eerie dusk chorus.

After several hours, once he'd reached the back of the crowd, he turned and watched them. More were arriving all the time, determined to climb the wall and find some way back through to the land of the living. Their cries and screams echoed through the air, and the wall continued to churn as new souls were born at the bottom and old souls rose higher and higher until they could disappear without being seen. The sight was like nothing he'd ever imagined, and he stood for some time before turning and looking out across the vast valley beyond.

The dead place, in all its glory, lay before him under a cloudy gray sky.

Drawn onward by the thought of finding some other way home, Doctor Robert Slocombe began to climb down into the depths of the valley. Eventually the mud gave way to wet grass, which dried as he got further along until he reached the bottom of the valley, where a river ran down from nearby mountains. He knelt and drank, although he no longer felt the need to fill his body at all. No hunger, no thirst, just a sense of being complete. Once he was back on his feet, he looked both ways before setting off away from the mountains, following the flow of the river as it meandered through the landscape. Occasionally he saw another soul passing, heading the other way and, no doubt, determined to reach the wall and climb up.

Eventually, the river met two others and together they began to rush toward the top of a waterfall. When he reached the edge, he looked out and saw the vastness of the land before him. It seemed impossible that such a world could exist, yet he remembered Douglas and Jenna showing him sections of the Myrkia that referenced precisely such a landscape. The world of the dead was just as vast and just as varied as the world of the living. Finding a set of steps that had been carved into the rocks, he began to make his way down the side of the waterfall until finally he reached the base, where he found to his surprise that an old man was sitting on a nearby rock, watching the water.

“Where am I?” Robert asked as he stepped closer.

Slowly, the old man turned to him.

“How do I get back?” he added.

“Back? To where?”

“I'm not...” Spotting more dead souls nearby, wandering in the direction of the valley and the wall, he realized that most people in the land of the dead were drawn to seek a way out. “I don't belong here,” he added finally, turning back to the old man. “I fell through, but this isn't where I'm supposed to be.”

“Pretty much everyone says that.”

“Feel my pulse,” he continued, holding his arm out. “It's true.”

Smiling, the old man felt for a pulse, and a flicker of surprise crossed his face as he realized that Robert wasn't lying.

“There has to be another way back,” Robert told him. “I don't care how far I have to go, but I shouldn't be here. I'm not dead! I have friends I have to see, and work I have to get done.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“Then...” The old man paused. “Your only hope is to go back the way you came, and try to climb the wall.”

“It's madness there.”

The old man nodded.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Robert asked. “I need to go back and prove to them all that this is real!”

“If there's another way,” the old man replied, “then I do not know of it. Then again, I would never present myself as an expert. If I were an expert, I would find better things to do with my time than sit on this rock and watch the water flow past. I mean, I suppose it makes me look quite wise and thoughtful, but the truth is, I'm just sitting here because I don't know what else to do.” He shrugged. “I suppose there are worse things. At least I gave up trying to climb the wall. Some do.”

“Which way should I go?”

“I have no idea. You will find people, though, regardless of which path you choose. There are new arrivals here daily. Many of them make straight for the wall so they can try to break back through, but the ones who are at peace, the ones who can accept what has happened to them...” He smiled again. “You'll just have to find out for yourself.”

“There's another way back,” he replied, stepping past the old man and hurrying along the shore. “I'll find it, I swear! There's no way I'm going to end up stuck here!”

With that, he hurried away, heading toward the vast horizon of a new world.

Epilogue

Six months later

“I think they like it,” Emily said as she sat next to Lizzie in the garden. “I think they even might put in an offer before they leave. They're not part of a chain, either.”

“And then we can move to that other house?” Lizzie asked.

“That's the plan.” Looking down at her hand, she slowly, and with some effort, clenched and then unclenched her fist. “It doesn't hurt much now. Looks as good as new, huh?” She watched as Lizzie linked some daisies together.

“It's for Doctor Slocombe,” the little girl explained after a moment. “Wherever he is.”

“That's nice of you. I'm sure he'd appreciate it.”

“Is my name Lizzie Sloane now?”

Emily nodded.

“And you're Emily Sloane?”

“It's not a big change. Anyway, I've got this new job coming up and I really don't want to have to deal with people asking questions again. We're starting a new life down in Kent, and I think that should apply to everything.” Reaching out, she put her arm around her daughter. “How about we go and put some flowers on Grandma's grave this afternoon? Once we move, we won't get back up here so often. And then we'll go and visit Uncle Stan and tell him the good news. Does that sound like a plan, or what?”

“It sounds like a plan,” Lizzie replied.

“And now,” Emily added, getting to her feet, “I'm going back in to make sure these people take the house. Wish me luck, I'm going to have to try to be charming.”

“Good luck.”

After watching as her mother headed inside, Lizzie turned and looked across the garden. She was waiting to see the lady again, the same lady she'd seen several times since the night at the laboratory. There had been no more strange noises in the house, and everything thought that the ghost was gone, but Lizzie had seen her a few more times, except that now she looked happier, and she seemed to spend her time in the garden, as if she liked being out in the sun. Most of the time, she was down by the old cherry tree over by the fence, which was where some bones had been found a few months earlier.

Spotting a hint of movement near one of the trees, she glanced over just in time to see a figure slipping through the sunlight. It was gone in the blink of an eye, but Lizzie knew it was her again. Whoever the ghost was, she seemed much happier now, as if she'd finally got what she wanted. The strangest thing was that when she saw the women in the garden, Lizzie no longer felt scared. She smiled as she realized that the ghost was at peace.

***

With all the boxes finally packed, Jenna stopped and looked around the room that was once Doctor Robert Slocombe's office. Six months after his disappearance, and with the police investigation having reached a dead end, the university had finally decided that they needed to use the space. She allowed herself a faint smile as she imagined Robert's reaction if he one day returned and discovered that his office was being turned into a janitorial storage room. The worst part was that the janitor had complained about the lack of a window, and now one was being installed.

Then again, she knew there was no hope. She'd accepted a long time ago that wherever Robert had ended up, he wasn't coming back.

“Knock knock,” Douglas said suddenly.

Turning, she saw him standing in the doorway, holding the Myrkia book in his hands.

“Sorry I didn't get down to help out,” he continued as he stepped inside. “I was too wrapped up in this thing.” Reaching the desk, he set the Myrkia down. “I finally read it all the way to the end, including each and every addendum.”

“I spoke to some people in the faculty office,” she replied. “I don't think they're going to give us the funding we need.”

“Then we'll find someone who will,” he muttered, opening the book and turning to one of the pages near the back. “This isn't over yet. We have to keep working.”

“He's not coming back,” she pointed out.

“I know.”

“Then why -”

“Have you read to the end of this thing?” he asked.

“I skimmed it. There's been so much to do lately.”

“So you haven't read this section?” he continued, pointing at one particular section of text.

“What does it say?” She took a glance at the last line. “They say he walks still? What does that mean?”

“It might be nothing,” he replied, “or it might be...” He paused, before starting to read from the top of the page. “The land of the dead is a vast, unmapped place. Some of the dead roam freely, while others look to create something new here. Those who accept the end of their lives are able to discover a new way of existing, but those who refuse to accept their new state are doomed to an eternity of pain and longing, usually at the foot of the great wall as they desperately try to climb up and -”

“We know all this,” she pointed out impatiently.

“Hang on,” he continued. “Only one person has ever truly set out to catalog and map this world,” he read out loud. “He appeared once at the foot of the great wall. An inquisitive, curious man, he himself tried to find a way back to the world of the living, before finally accepting that he should, instead, walk this new place and learn as much as he could, exploring all its areas and attempting to create the impossible: a map of this dead world.” He paused, before turning to her. “Sound like anyone we know?”

“You can't be serious.”

“Don't you think that's what Rob would have done if he'd survived and ended up trapped over there?”

“But...” She looked down at the book. “This thing was written hundreds of years ago.”

“We know that time works differently there. We also know that the Myrkia was supposedly transcribed by a man who heard voices in his head. After everything we've seen, let's not pretend that a discrepancy of a few hundred years makes much of a difference.”

“Still, we can't...”

He waited for her to continue.

“Can't what?” he asked.

“Let me see it,” she replied, making her way around the table. After a moment, she began to read from the book: “The man walked and walked, and since he had no means of writing his discoveries down, he carried them all in his mind, and he found that he never ran out of space, and he never forgot anything he had learned.” She paused, with tears in her eyes as she imagined Robert all alone, exploring a strange new world. “He befriended people along the way, he stayed with some of them, but he always moved on eventually. He was in no rush, he had all the time he could ever need, and he devoted himself to the twin acts of discovery and exploration. He saw things...” She paused again, taking a deep breath as a tear ran down her cheek. “He saw things...”

***

He saw things no living man had ever seen before. He walked the land of the dead, and yet he himself was not dead. Somehow, in some manner that has become lost to the mists of time, he had found some other way into this place. It is said that as he walked and walked, he saw everything there was to see. He crossed the Valley of Blood and met the Herremanites on the other side. He climbed the jaws of death and saw the view from the top. He met Archylegia and discussed the next step while sipping tea from the arches of an ancient city. He dined with the twelve-sided god and offered advice on the problem of the Mes. He even crossed to other worlds for a time, and spent many years with the Drazi, and learning the ways of the Grandapams, and wandering the continents of the Great Library. It is said that no living creature in all of existence has seen so much, and that no matter how long or how far he walked, he never tired and he never forgot a thing.

They say he walks still.

***

“Come on!” Emily called out from the back door. “Let's go and get some ice cream!”

Smiling, Lizzie got to her feet and hurried to join her mother.

OTHER BOOKS

BY AMY CROSS INCLUDE

Horror

3AM

The Farm

The Scream

Tenderling

The Girl Clay

The Prison

Asylum

American Coven

The Night Girl

Devil's Briar

Ward Z

Ward Z: Revelation

The Last Priest

The Devil's Photographer

Fantasy / Horror

Dark Season series 1, 2 & 3

The Hollow Church (Abby Hart 1)

Vampire Asylum (Abby Hart 2)

Dead Souls volumes 1 & 2

Lupine Howl series 1 to 4

Grave Girl

Graver Girl (Grave Girl 2)

Ghosts

The Library

Journey to the Library (The Library Saga 2)

The Ghosts of London

The Vampire's Grave

The Werewolf's Curse

Thriller

Ophelia

The Dead City (Ophelia 2)

Fallen Heroes (Ophelia 3)

The Girl Who Never Came Back

The Dead and the Dying (Joanna Mason 1)

The House of Broken Backs (Joanna Mason 2)

The Pornographer's Wife

Other People's Bodies

Dystopia / Science Fiction

The Shades

Finality series 1

Mass Extinction Event series 1 to 4

Also by Amy Cross

THE GIRL CLAY

Ten years ago, a scared little girl was supposed to lead a doomsday cult to a new level of spiritual awakening. Today, that same little girl is on the run, desperately trying to stay one step ahead of a vengeful minor deity.

Rebecca 'Clay' Layton knows that one day the past will catch up to her. Ever since her mother took her to live with the Cult of Attaroth, something has been different about Clay: not only does she have a striking ability to communicate with the dead, but she has also drawn the attention of a dangerous, unstable entity that wants to use her as his instrument.

Attaroth is both a god and a demon, all rolled into one. He has Clay in his sights, and he's determined to draw her back into his game. When he forces her to travel to the remote town of Silverglade, however, it becomes clear that Attaroth's plans are far darker than anyone could ever have expected. After ten years, a horrific prophecy is about to be put to the test, and Clay's blood is required.

The Girl Clay is the story of a little girl who was pushed too far, and a woman who finally has to stop running and face the demon from her childhood.

Also by Amy Cross

ASYLUM

After killing her younger brother, Annie Radford is sent to Lakehurst Psychiatric Hospital. But Lakehurst hides some dark secrets. Patients are regularly subjected to 'special treatment' in the basement, while the cruel Nurse Winter rules the hospital with an iron fist.

As Annie struggles to retain her sense of identity, she finds herself being drawn deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Lakehurst. Suffering under the horrific conditions imposed on her at Lakehurst, Annie starts to doubt her own sanity, especially when she once again starts to hear the voices that plagued her when she was younger.

Who is the strange old man in the attic? What does Jerry keep in a jar in the basement, and why is he so keen to continue with his macabre and vicious experiments? Where did the husks come from? And how is this all linked to mysterious radio signals being monitored in a forest hundreds of miles away?

Also by Amy Cross

THE PRISON

One hundred years ago, a horrific mass murder resulted in the permanent closure of Hardstone Women's Prison. Now the prison is being re-opened, but as a new generation of prisoners arrive to fill the cells, something evil is waiting in the shadows.

Amanda Weir doesn't remember killing her children. All she knows is that she woke up with their bloody bodies in her arms. Sentenced to life in prison, she arrives at Hardstone and tries to adjust to her new life. All she wants is to forget her old self, and to find some way to live with what she did. After all, there's no way she could be innocent...

There's something else at Hardstone, however. Something lost and alone, something angry. The ghost of a little girl has been spotted several times, and the prisoners have learned a valuable lesson: whenever the ghost is seen, anyone who looks into its eyes will be dead within a matter of days. But what does the ghost want, and exactly how far has its influence spread in the lives of the prisoners?

Also by Amy Cross

THE NIGHT GIRL

When she starts her new job as a night shift assistant, Juliet Collier has no idea that she's about to meet a mysterious entity that lurks in an abandoned part of the building.

Soon, Juliet finds herself granted a gift that means she can kill indiscriminately, and apparently without consequences. Meanwhile, eleven years earlier, a young Juliet makes a terrible mistake that sets her on a dark course.

The Night Girl is the story of a girl whose decisions lead her to a devastating end-point, as she struggles to reconcile the voices in her head with the reality in front of her eyes.

Also by Amy Cross

DEVIL'S BRIAR

In the remote wilderness of Colorado, Bill and Paula Mitchell discover an entire lost town.

Devil's Briar was abandoned many years ago, and has fallen into disrepair. But it soon becomes clear that the town contains some special and highly unusual qualities, and that elements of the past are seeping through into the present. As she tries to get to the bottom of the mystery, Paula finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into the bizarre time loop that keeps the entire town trapped in eternity.

Soon it becomes clear that nothing in Devil's Briar will ever be the same again, and that two time periods are merging with horrific consequences.

Also by Amy Cross

WARD Z

It began with a strange new kind of cancer, born on the other side of the world. Eventually, it erupted on a British hospital ward...

When a new cancer patient is brought into his care, Dr. Andrew Page assumes it'll just be another case of battling against the odds. Soon, however, he realizes that this new patient has been infected by a type of cancer that shows signs of intelligence. As the ward is put into lock-down, Dr. Page struggles to understand the nature of the disease. More and more people start to become sick, until finally Dr. Page has to face the horrific truth: a new strain of cancer has emerged, taking control of its victims' bodies and turning them into zombie-like creatures.

For Dr. Page, this is a terrifying but fascinating new development. For the military, however, it means only one thing: the ward must be sealed, and the entire building - including everyone trapped inside - must be studied, observed... and then killed.

Ward Z is a medical horror novel about a deadly new disease that emerges from a particularly virulent form of cancer. Also available - Ward Z: Revelation, in which the deadly infestation spreads to a holiday camp.

Also by Amy Cross

AMERICAN COVEN

He kidnapped three women and held them in his basement.

He thought they couldn't fight back.

He was wrong...

Snatched from the street near her home, Holly Carter is taken to a rural house and thrown down into a stone basement. She meets two other women who have also been kidnapped, and soon Holly learns about the horrific rituals that take place in the house. Eventually, she's called upstairs to take her place in the ice bath.

Over time, however, Holly learns about a mysterious power that exists in the basement, and which the three women can use as they struggle to escape. When they finally manage to get through the metal door, however, the women have no idea that their fight for freedom is going to stretch out for more than a decade, or that it will culminate in a final, devastating demonstration of their new-found powers.

Also by Amy Cross

THE DEVIL'S PHOTOGRAPHER

As she investigates a series of strange images, photographer Kate Logan finds herself drawn closer to a mysterious church that seems to hide a number of secrets. However, just as she seems to be getting somewhere, Kate's shocked to learn that the church has burned down.

Meanwhile, she starts spending time with a man named John Dagwood, who has an unusual interest in medieval medical techniques. Following some bad news about her own health, Kate starts to consider taking extreme action in order to get her body back under control.

As she gets closer to the truth, Kate discovers that her entire life has been affected by a dark promise made many years ago. By the time she learns about the sinister forces operating behind the scenes, it might be too late for her to escape her destiny.

Also by Amy Cross

DEAD SOULS

When Kate Langley arrives on the island of Thaxos for a vacation she never wanted in the first place, she has no idea that she's about to be drawn into an ancient and deadly struggle.

Before long, Kate learns that she's not the only recent arrival. Edgar Le Compte has come to Thaxos in order to reclaim his family's long-abandoned ancestral home. Many of the locals are dismayed by the return of the Le Compte name, and it seems as if the entire island is gripped by paranoia.

When Kate finally meets Edgar, she's surprised by his friendliness. But dark secrets lurk in the shadows, and when Kate receives an unexpected job offer that could keep her on the island, she's forced to decide whether or not she believes some of the wilder and more fantastical claims about the Le Compte family.

Dead Souls is an ongoing, weekly paranormal horror serial. Each 15,000 word installment ends on a cliffhanger. As of June 2015, the serial is up to part 41.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Epilogue