SEVEN
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Liz woke with a start.
She sat upright.
Where was she?
She was in Delgado Manor.
She was in bed.
And she was alive.
Being alive didn't bother
her. Whatever its travails, it was still better than the alternative
and, at the risk of being presumptuous, she'd expected - one way or
another - to still be with us come daybreak. That wasn't the issue.
She climbed out of bed
and checked the windows. No sign that anything had tried to get in
through them.
She glanced across at the
door, and the chair was still propped against it. As far as she could
make out, there hadn't even been an attempt on her life, and that
didn't make sense.
She climbed back onto the
bed, crossed one leg over the other and sat there thinking. According
to Carl Seevers, Daniel Robinson had been getting visitations from
his very first night there, so why not her? She took a cigarette from
the packet by the bed, stuck it in her mouth and lit it.
Moments later the door
rattled. Someone was trying to get in, their route blocked by the
chair. A greater effort and it shifted, hitting the floor, before
being pushed aside by the door opening.
It was Mrs Hobson.
Wordless, she strode across to Liz, took the cigarette from the
investigator's mouth and crushed it in the palm of her hand. Showing
no signs of having been burned by it, she placed the dead butt back
in her new employer's mouth. 'Smoking in bed, young lady, costs
lives.' And, with that, she headed for the door.
'Mrs Hobson?'
The woman stopped, hand
on doorknob, then looked towards Liz.
'In the night,' said Liz,
'did you hear anything?'
'Such as?'
'Noises? Rattlings?
Bumpings?'
'Noises?' said the woman.
'Why on Earth would I want to hear anything like that?' And, with a
slam of the door, she was gone.
*
First thing that morning
found Alison in her best clothes and stood outside a run-down office
block up a city centre backstreet. According to the card Frank had
given her, it was where she'd find Liz's boss.
She looked the place up
and down, waited a moment while she reset her chutzpah to eleven, and
went inside.
*
After breakfast Liz
started searching the house for whatever secret it was Daniel
Robinson had thought it contained.
She didn't find anything.
She didn't find any
trapdoors, secret passageways, anomalous rooms, nooks or crannies.
She didn't find any patterns in any wallpaper that might have been
encoded information, or any arrangement of artworks that might
suggest a hidden meaning. She found nothing behind mirrors. She found
nothing behind paintings. She found nothing behind drawers. She found
nothing in suits of armour.
What she did find was
Valentyne Delgado's study. That was hardly a shock, bearing in mind
that Rachel had introduced her to it the afternoon before. She
stepped inside, closed the door behind her and set about giving its
walls a good knocking, in case of hidden chambers.
That got her nowhere, nor
did tapping the ceiling with the feet of an upturned wooden chair. So
she turned her attention to the one wall she couldn't knock. That was
because there was no wall available to knock. It was completely
obscured by row after row of leather-bound tomes.
She went across and
checked them; Dickens, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Proust, Joyce - A A
Milne. Obviously Delgado, if they were his - and the volumes on the
occult pointed that way - believed in being well read. She pulled one
from its shelf.
It was a dummy.
So was the one beside it.
And the one beside that.
In the entire room, not
one of its books was real. Clearly he thought it more important to
look like something than to actually be that thing.
She gazed around. There
was nothing else in the room of any interest except the bureau, with
its marble bust of Delgado - and its urn containing the great man's
ashes. She picked it up, removed its lid and checked its contents.
They looked like anybody's ashes to her. She licked a finger, jabbed
it into the ashes then tasted them.
They tasted human to her.
She put the lid back on
the urn and checked the bureau's drawers. She found nothing beyond
the statutory paper clips, stapler and drawing pins. She checked
behind the drawers ... and found nothing.
That left her to clear up
just one mystery about the room. Who, exactly, had left behind the
fedora that lay, upturned, on the bureau?
*
'Mr Ferman, you don't
know how grateful I am that you've agreed to see me.'
Lou Ferman was not at all
what Alison Parker had expected. She was expecting Skinner from the
X-Files.
Instead he was stood there in jeans and a T-shirt, before the world's
most cluttered desk. Hanging from his chin was a goatee. His build
was thin, his eyes huge. His office was as cluttered as his desk, its
not-recently-cleaned window giving a partial view of the soon-to-be
demolished hotel opposite.
Stood throwing darts at
the board on the wall, he said, 'So, let me have it. What's this
matter of life and death you've come to see me about?'
'Mr Ferman, I want a
job.'
'Doing what?'
'Being Assistant Occult
Investigator to my flatmate.'
'Because?'
'She won't let me go
along with her on investigations - even when they involve me and even
though she knows I need to know what she gets up to, to complete my
novel.'
'What novel?'
She put her rucksack on
his desk, unbuckled its straps, undid its single brass stud and
looked inside for the item she needed. After a few moments, she found
it, retrieved it, made sure to get it the right way round and handed
it to him.
He studied it. It was
still just a title page. 'She
Went in Search of Oblivion,'
he said. 'That's Betty all right.' He checked the other side of the
sheet. 'It's a bit short.'
'I can't write more till
she lets me go along with her and I get the chance to see her in
action. A writer must know her subject fully to write about it. Mr
Ferman, I don't like to show off but I've got a CV to kill for, I'm
honest, reliable, popular with everyone I meet. I'm not scared of
hard work - or monsters - and I was up all last night working out a
twelve-point plan for improving the way Liz does her job.'
'You said you don't know
how Betty does her job.'
'Knowing Liz I'm betting
none of it involves Public Relations.'
'You can say that again.'
She was about to go on
but didn't. The man was occupied with rummaging around in a filing
cabinet, till he finally found what he was after. He took it from the
cabinet, shut the drawer then took her hand. He turned her hand, palm
up, and placed the newly collected object in it.
She studied the thing. It
was some sort of measuring implement, about the size of a cigarette
packet, with a dial on it.
He said, 'What's this?'
'A temperature gauge?'
she ventured.
'And what's it for?'
'Detecting ghosts?'
'Congratulations, Parko.
You're our new assistant spook buster.'
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1 comment:
Great read thanks for writing this
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