“I’m not mad.” Michelle Duncan’s hands
shook as she reached towards the plastic cup of water the detective had
provided.
The blond man sitting opposite her gave no
reply.
“And I’m not drunk or on drugs, either!”
That had been what they first suspected,
when she had flung herself across the bonnet of the police car, babbling
hysterically about graveyards and murder.
“And I’m not lying either!” She heard the
hysterical note rise again in her voice and forced herself to look up to meet
the blond man’s eyes. They were an icy blue that made her think of her Swedish
grandmother and they had the same hard look that her grandmother’s eyes took on
when she knew Michelle was lying.
Only this time Michelle wasn’t lying.
“I don’t understand what happened, I just
know it did.”
“Why don’t you tell us again what you
remember?” Detective Dan Taylor suggested gently, from his seat beside the blond
man.
Michelle had known Dan Taylor most of her
life, but she’d never until now realised how reassuring his presence could be.
In the midst of the angry cops, the dead-eyed police doctor and now the hard
eyed blond man, Dan’s familiar, slightly podgy face was a reminder of the normal
world. The world where on Sunday, he would be singing out of tune in the church
service and his mother would cluck her tongue with Michelle’s mother and
complain about his girlfriend.
She nodded like a little bird. “OK,” she
said, sounding and feeling like a small kid. She risked a glance again at the
blond man, wondering who he was, how he fitted into all this. At first she had
thought he was another cop, maybe someone higher up the chain by the way the
others almost bowed and scraped to him. Then she’d thought, with his black
clothes and hard eyes, that he was a shrink. Neither seemed to fit him, and it
scared her a little.
She swallowed, took a deep breath and
began again. “Every Halloween, a bunch of us, the kids who are too old for trick
or treating, but too young for the Halloween parties, go to the cemetery as soon
as it gets dark. We usually just
hang out, tell ghost stories, maybe jump out from behind a couple of tombstones
to scare each other, but it’s all just kid’s stuff, you know?”
She glanced at the blond man, who didn’t
say anything. The thought of that
evening's planned innocent fun made her eyes sting and she rubbed at them. God
only knew what she looked like. She'd caught a brief glimpse of her face in a
mirror in the Police Doctor's room. With the white powder standing out against
her pale skin and her smudged mascara turning her eye sockets black, she looked
like a monotone clown. The thought almost made her laugh and gave her some form
of strength.
"This year, Charlie Bates managed somehow
to get hold of an Ouija board.
He thought, we all thought, it would be fun to try it out in the
cemetery." She looked from one to the other. "None of us, I think, really
thought anything was going to happen. It was just supposed to be fun, you know?"
Dan smiled encouragingly. The blond man
didn't respond.
"We decided, all of us really, to try it
out on the tombstone of Clara Mont, also known as Rosa Brae."
The blond man's face creased in confusion.
Michelle's surprise at his reaction overcame her fear.
"Rosa Brae? The Rose of the World? She was
notorious in the twenties, had thousands of lovers, supposed to have killed a
couple of them?"
As the blond man’s face still showed a
lack of comprehension, she continued: "She's buried in the cemetery under a huge
black marble tombstone. It’s the only one; the only marble one in the cemetery.”
She swallowed suddenly. "We thought it
would be fun to try and get to the truth about her. Only..." She paused. "It seemed a lot less fun in
the dark. And the rain."
Dan smiled, like he understood. Like he
could understand how that place looked in the dark, with the rain splashing down
like a something out of a horror movie. Strange, that had made it less scary
somehow; she hadn't been keen to go,
but more because she didn't want to get wet and cold than because she was
frightened. She’d tried to talk Charlie out of it, but he'd called her a coward
and Tom, Harry and Scott backed him up. So she'd gone along.
"All we had were the torches, so we got
lost.”
She remembered stumbling around, bashing
her leg against a monument to Annie Chapel ("After Life's heavy burden do I
sleep.") when Harry, Harriet Food, though she couldn’t remember anyone other
than adults ever calling her that,
had called out, waving her torch around, so proud at finding a black
tombstone. They’d all been cold, wet, and eager to start this so it would soon
be over, that they hadn't bothered to check the name. They just gathered in a
circle around the stone with the board in the centre, all their fingers resting
on it.
"It was about five minutes before we
realised our mistake. We didn't do anything, at least I don't think we did, only
we must have, mustn't we?" She looked from one to the other, seeking
reassurance.
Dan looked uncomfortable. "What happened
next?"
This was the bit she was certain they
didn't believe. She wouldn't have believed it herself.
"There was a flash of light and a horrible
loud cracking noise. I saw Harry grab at Scott, but I thought she was using it
as an excuse because she fancies him. Charlie was cross, said it was just
lightning hitting a tree and Tom said we should think about leaving as the storm
was getting worse. I wish we had."
She muttered softly. Gathering her courage
in both hands, she continued, "There was this dreadful cracking noise, like... I
don't know what it was like, but Tom, who lived in America for a bit, said he
thought it was like an earthquake. And then there was this terrible booming
voice." She shook her head. "I've heard people talk about voices coming from the
depths of hell, but until tonight I didn't really know what it sounded like."
"Did you hear what the voice said?" The
blond man spoke for the first time. She was surprised to hear an American accent
in his voice. She shook her head.
"Just odd words. Scarlet failed... Instrument of Destruction. I couldn't properly tell, because
I wanted to get away from it. We all did."
She could see them all as though their
faces were caught in a camera flash in her mind; Harry clinging to Scott who was
pulling her back, Tom's hands formed in fists and Charlie... poor Charlie,
frozen in place, staring.
"He just appeared in the middle of the
graveyard. He could only have come from the grave. There was a weird green
light, which seemed to come from him. He stared around like... he didn't know
where he was or what had happened. But his eyes... they were glowing green."
She shivered, her whole body moving in
fear.
"I just started to run. Didn’t know where
I was going. I tripped over a tree root just in time to see Charlie... oh God,
Charlie."
She could see him now. It felt like she would
always see him. Held high between those awful white hands. And the light...
Strange how the priest had always spoken of hellfire as being red, not green. He
got one thing right, though; it could consume a person and leave no mark.
Charlie's body had just... disintegrated. One moment he was there and the next
he wasn't, his mouth open in a silent scream as his soul was sucked up by the
other man. That’s all she could be certain of.
“I just ran," she admitted softly. "Just
ran and didn't stop until I ran into the car." She sat staring at her hands. "I'm
telling the truth. But I can't explain it."
Dan smiled sadly. "Your mum's waiting outside. I'm going to
get one of the officers to drive you home. Okay?" he said gently.
Michelle nodded.
I’m sorry if it's nothing," Dan said,
closing the door on the teenager. "But you said if there was anything odd
involving the cemetery, you wanted to know about it."
Captain Blue nodded coldly, pulling on his
Blue body armour. It wouldn’t have done for Spectrum to be taking an interest in
an English Halloween prank investigation, even if it was the grave of one of
their agents which was violated.
"An officer has been round to Charlie
Bates’ home, his parents haven't seen him since this evening, thought he was
still out with his friends."
Blue simply nodded once more.
Frustrated, Dan grabbed a chair, suddenly
throwing it across the room. "What the fuck is going on?" he demanded. "I got a
robbed grave, a missing kid and three others scared half to death. So what the
fuck is going on?"
He had the momentary satisfaction of
seeing the Spectrum captain look uncomfortable.
"We’ll need another couple of days in the
cemetery," Blue said quietly.
Authors Notes:
This story was inspired by the image of
Scarlet pulling himself out of the grave on this great website. I started
thinking about the stories of Ouija boards summoning up things and what would
happen if you were just an ordinary group of
friends mucking around on Halloween and that happened (Think about what those
guys in Shapeshifter, they thought Scarlet was a zombie). Then I
thought what about that night when Black came back...
Thanks to Chris and the Beta panel. As ever, you guys rule.
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